If you’re new to the world of pickup trucks you'll soon find there's a lot more to think about when it comes to the specification than anyone has to consider with a car or an SUV. One very important area that should be relatively straightforward – but isn’t – is the cab. It isn’t as though there are dozens of different cab types to choose between, because there aren’t. The problem is different manufacturers give the three basic cab types different names, so here's a guide to those three cabs and who calls them what.
Regular cab
One area of rare alignment between manufacturers is the most basic cab type, which they all now seem to refer to as the Regular Cab. Apart from the odd rare exception, a regular cab is a two-door pickup with a single row of seating. This is the way pickup trucks were configured in the early days, but they're not as popular with buyers today as they once were as they're obviously not as spacious and flexible as the other types of cab. But for someone wanting a basic pickup to do a job of work that doesn’t need to accommodate a bunch of passengers it's the most affordable version of any truck line.
Extended cab
This is where things start to get confusing. What we're referring to here as an extended cab is the middle of the three cab variations. We're talking about a cab that can be two or four-door with two rows of seats, but four-door versions will have rear doors that are smaller than those at the front and may only open if the front door is opened first. The rear doors may also open in the opposite direction to those at the front, which is a designed usually referred to as 'suicide doors.' The rear seats might not be full size either, but it's still a much more spacious and flexible cab than a regular. The problem is hardly any manufacturer calls this an extended cab. Chevy and GMC call it a double cab, Toyota calls it an access cab or a double cab, Nissan uses the term king cab, while it’s a Quad Cab for Ram and a SuperCab for Ford.
Crew cab
The last, the largest and the most popular cab these days is the crew cab, and thankfully it’s the name used by Chevy, GMC, Ram and Nissan for their versions. Here we're talking about a four-door cab with two rows of full-size seats and all four of the doors are conventional full-size offerings that all open the same way. The beauty of this type of cab is it makes the pickup a viable and practical alternative to a sedan or an SUV because it combines the space inside to accommodate up to six people with the flexibility of an open bed. It's usually easy to identify in brochures of manufacturers who don’t actually use the term crew cab because 'crew' is usually in the name somewhere. For calls it a SuperCrew and Toyota uses the term CrewMax. However, Toyota has also confusingly called it a double cab in the past at times. The one possible downside of a crew cab is the size of the bed. Because the cab is reasonably long itself, a lot of manufacturers don’t offer their longest bed with crew cab variants. This is because most crew cab buyers don’t need the practicality of a massive bed, and the few models that do combine a full-size bed with a crew cab are extremely long and pretty difficult to maneuver as a result.
Truck Cab Types Explained