I Love My Regular-Cab Pickup, but Let's Face It, It's No Family Car

From the December 2022 issue of Car and Driver.

There I was with the wind rushing past, the starlit sky above, the air alive with the soft thrum of a V-8 on a warm autumn night. Was I driving a Mustang convertible? Something fancier, like a Mercedes SL? Nope. I was in the bed of my 2003 Dodge pickup, wondering where it all went wrong.

There's a difference between riding in the bed of a truck for fun and riding there because you must. I was in the latter camp thanks to my own decisions—namely, my foolish devotion to the regular-cab pickup. Ours is a family of four, and the Ram seats three. When those unforgiving facts collide, the guy who bought the truck gets to experience the great outdoors while listening to his wife slipping the clutch a little too much (but not being able to say anything about it on account of being, technically, cargo).

When I bought the Ram, it didn't occur to me that its three-seat, regular-cab layout was anything other than awesome. Everyone is driving a four-door truck, but not me. I'm an iconoclast with my bench seat and manual transmission. A purist. And if that leads to occasional inconvenience, that's the price of art. The art, in this case, being a third-gen Ram with clear-coat that looks like it was applied at Chernobyl Reactor 4.

Time and again I've prioritized my nebulous sense of automotive greatness over practicality, or affordability, or reliability, or safety, or fuel economy, or comfort, or refinement, or resale value, or having the interior switches labeled in English. I'm certainly well acquainted with the view from the top of the petard, so many times have I been hoisted. In the mid-'90s, I was the only person I knew with a cellphone. And I needed it because of my dumb cars.