Ford Designed A 6-Door Pickup With 3-Row Seating
Ford’s small $30,000 electric pickup made big news this week, but it’s also thinking about huge trucks.
The automaker has filed for a patent on a design for a truck with three rows of seating and six doors.
The sketches depict it with two front seats, two captain’s chairs in the middle row and a three-across third row bench against the back wall of the cabin.
The front two rows are powered recliners with footrests that are mounted on rails so that they can be repositioned, and the second row can be rotated 180 degrees, or just 90 degrees to make it easier to load a child seat.
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All of it can be done remotely and eight pre-set modes are described that include a Social mode, where the front seats face the rear bench and the center console shifts between them. There’s also a Cargo mode that folds up the second two rows and stacks them together.
In an Office mode, the rear bench is folded up to reveal a work table that flips down from the bottom an can be used by someone sitting in a rear-facing second row seat.
There are a wide variety of configurations that can be achieved outside of the pre-sets and the entire setup makes it more like a minivan on the inside than a pickup.
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The exact dimensions of the vehicle are not stated, but the cabin is clearly larger than any that is currently offered on an F-Series model and it is possible it is intended for an electric truck. Ford hasn’t said exactly what it had in mind and files a lot of patents that never make it to production.
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The design is similar to one that Ford’s rivals at Ram revealed at the CES 2023 in the Ram Revolution pickup concept, which had a third row of jump seats, show car-style opposing doors and not nearly as much interior space or as many layout options.
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Ram also hasn’t brought anything like it to production yet, but with the popularity of pickups and three-row SUVs in the USA, it seems like only a matter of time before the two worlds collide.