Ram ‘Pickup Van’ Patent Teases Us With Possibilities

Has Ram just reinvented the van as a truck? A new patent from the truck company teases us with the possibility of a pickup truck with three rows of seats and modular seating.

Ram 1500 Revolution Concept Feature Becomes Real

Ram brought the Ram 1500 Revolution BEV Concept to CES in 2023. The electric pickup concept had so many cool and futuristic features that it was easy to skip over the more fantastical ones. And regardless, most of those innovative ideas disappeared when Ram showed off the production version of the pickup.

One of those pie-in-the-sky features was a third row of seats. The 1500 BEV Concept had jump seats mounted to the power-operated midgate. The seats could be used inside for extra passengers or folded up for more cargo space. Or you could unclip them and hang them on the tailgate for outside seating when you were parked.

Now Ram has filed for a patent on the idea, and that has us wondering. Will Ram actually build a three-row pickup? And is a three-row truck really just a van with a bed? How long of a pickup bed can you put on a truck that needs room for three rows of seats, anyway? Will the next Ram be the first pickup with a 3-foot bed?

Patent Shows Off New Jump Seat

OK, that’s way too many questions. So first, a look at the patent.

The application was filed in December of last year and published on July 4, 2024 (link to patent PDF here). Which means someone at the patent office was working on the holiday!

It describes “a jump seat configured to be attached to and detached from a rear wall of the passenger cabin.” It includes a seat back that’s attached to the frame, a pivot attached to the frame to fold up the seat base, and a mechanism to remove the whole thing from the truck.

The in-cabin drawings in the patent filing are clearly the Revolution concept truck; the seats are far more futuristic than any current Ram. But that doesn’t really matter. It’s the mechanism that it describes we’re interested in.

Jump seats in the back of a pickup are nothing new, but these are different. No sitting sideways, smashed between a seatback and a wall, with your legs in the crotch of the person in the other seat. These seats have you facing forward. So, unless the cabin is longer than the old Ram Mega Cabs, it will be your own legs in your crotch.

The First-Ever 8-Seat Pickup?

Even if you don’t want to seat eight passengers in your pickup van, having extra seats can be handy. As we said up top, the patent drawings show the seats in use on the tailgate for, well, tailgating. We could see using them at a campsite or even as sports stadium seating instead of hard benches. Plus, having some extra enclosed cabin space is always a plus.

Will Ram actually build the feature, though? Signs, as they say, point to yes. When the production version of the truck was revealed in April 2023, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares told Motor Trend that “everything that you have seen on the CES concept car will come at different steps of the lifecycle management or for the next generation, depending on the feature.”

To us, that sounds a lot like a yes. So, keep an eye out for the 2026 Ram 1500 Pickup Van.

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