The First-Ever Crew Cab Truck Wasn't Made By Ford Or Chevy
No, it wasn't a Dodge, either. It was actually an International Harvester — a brand whose legacy still lives on in the form of Volkswagen-owned Scout Motors, which is set to release its first electrified Traveler SUV in 2028. As for that first International Harvester crew cab, it launched in 1957 as the Travelette, although it wasn't quite a traditional setup. The '57 models did have two rows of seating for up to six people, allowing the truck to carry a full job crew in the cabin and save the bed for work-related cargo. Still, it only had three doors –one for the driver and two for the crew — before a four-door crew-cab version arrived in 1961, which was still a few years before any of the traditional Big Three got in on the action.
The original Travelettes was also available with other new-for-their-time features, including a smooth-sided bed instead of a traditional stepside configuration with exposed rear fenders. This may not seem like a big deal now, but the differences between stepside vs. fleetside truck beds led to a major shift in pickup design and functionality. The stepside setup generally mounts the bed between the wheels, making it narrower than if the side walls extended the full width of the truck.
Innovations like these didn't do much for the Travelette's sales numbers, however. The truck was built on International Harvester's A-120 4x4 platform, and while the company allegedly only produced 8,873 trucks with that chassis for 1957, only 17 are believed to have been Travelettes.
When were the Big Three's crew cabs born?
Sales numbers such as those may be one reason that International Harvester's rivals didn't begin building their own crew cabs until roughly 5 years after the Travelette debuted: The next entry in the segment was the Dodge D200, which premiered in 1963. Technically, the D200 was a rear-wheel-drive pickup, with four-wheel-drive versions getting a "W" prefix instead of the "D," but both versions were available with crew cabs. Dodge's design was also uniquely eye-catching, with the automaker using the same stampings for the rear doors as for the front, giving all four doors a distinctive curved rear edge for their window frames.
The 1965 Ford F-250 was the first pickup from the Blue Oval to offer a crew cab, and the first crew-cab Chevrolet didn't come until 1973 — when the C/K Series launched the industry's first crew-cab dually truck. Now, to be clear, that means that all of the original domestic crew-cab models were medium-duty trucks, not light-duty rides like the Ram 1500, Ford F-150, and Silverado 1500.
None of those half-ton trucks got true crew cabs until the beginning of the 21st century –- though there had been four-door extended-cabs, and the Dodge Quad Cab, with smaller cabin dimensions, before then. There was also the Ford Explorer Sport Trac that debuted in 2000, but that was considered an SUV with an open bed. Anyway, the 2001 Ford F-150 is widely considered the first proper light-duty crew cab, with the Chevrolet Silverado joining the club in 2004. Dodge/Ram didn't introduce its first "real" crew cab until 2009. The rest, as they say, is history, and the crew cab has grown into the best-selling pickup cab style today.