What Year Did Chevrolet Come Out With 3-Door Trucks? (And Is It Still Making Them?)

If you are going out to get yourself a pickup truck, one of the biggest decisions you have to make is whether it has two or four doors. Trucks can either be regular cabs, which have just one row of seats, or extended or crew cab models that have two. For many people, they need that second row, particularly if they have children. Not only does having children in the back seat give the driver some breathing room, but it is also a safer place for them.

One place where back seat safety can be a little tricky is with the doors. If you do not have a child safety lock feature enabled, you run the risk of a child carelessly opening the door into traffic. Not only could this damage your door but also be a serious injury risk or worse, especially if they get out without properly looking.

So, if you want to avoid this, you may want to check out a pickup truck with three doors. They aren't among the rarest trucks of all time, but there was a brief period when a company like Chevrolet built its extended cab trucks with only one rear passenger door. If that sounds appealing, here's where you need to look.

For the 1996 model year, instead of having a four-door extended cab, Chevrolet decided to reduce that number to three on select models. This was done on the Chevrolet C/K 1500, and the one rear door would be slightly hidden on the passenger's side of the truck. This means that if the truck was parked on the street, the only way to get out of the back seat would be to exit onto the curb, eliminating any risk of being blindsided by a passing vehicle as you get out. 

Aesthetically, it does look rather odd because we are so used to four doors, but when you consider that this is the same concept that governs so many manufacturers of minivans, it makes a lot more sense. Chevrolet extended this three-door option to the larger 2500 and 3500 models too, along with the S-Series models.

The C/K truck line would get a new name for the 1999 model year, the Chevrolet Silverado. Obviously, the company still produces that vehicle today and is the second best-selling vehicle in the United States. However, the three-door setup would not make it very far into the new millennium as Chevrolet decided to discontinue the three-door truck models after the 2001 model year. This was already a configuration that was somewhat specialized, and ultimately, Chevrolet no longer saw a need to keep producing them. Now, if you see one of these on the street, you get to marvel in its rather funky, offbeat look, and for certain people out there, it's exactly what they want in their garage.