With a bed a far cry from the minimum 6 footer asked for.

My family (consisting of truck buyers in middle america) is generally going to balk at anything shorter than an 8 foot bed. That's the standard length for most building materials. Lumber, drywall, sheetrock, you name it.

Conduit and pipe tend to come in 10 ft lengths, which only hang out the back of an 8 ft bed a little, but are a real touch-and-go experience with shorter beds.

If a manufacturer doesn't offer an 8 ft bed, what they're selling probably isn't a work truck.

Honestly an 8ft bed is a luxury. Most building material moves fine in a short bed. Pipe rack or a trailer if you are really needing that stuff on the daily. A lot easier to unload the trailer for any significant load.

I wouldn't get it if I were, say, a drywall installer, but my Maverick worked perfectly well for supplies for refinishing part of my basement. 4x8 sheets fit flat on top of the wheel arches with the tailgate half down.

10 ft pipes I can put through the rear window... would be nice if some short-bed trucks came with bed access like the Chevy Avalanche.

Well that's what I said, isn't it. A work truck. A truck you use as part of your work.

> Does the Maverick have a bed extender?

It does, but it's never really made sense for my use. I use the bed frequently, but like 95% of the time I don't need the tailgate down, and for the times I do, I keep some ratchet straps in the back seat.

Yeah, that's what I did with my Baja. I actually just left the straps (and a snow shovel) in the bed. People are surprisingly not dicks, never had any of that stuff stolen.

I used the bed extender a lot, though. Moving furniture, beds, a moped, you name it.

I feel like a tonneau cover does help with theft, even if it's not secured at all, there's a significant difference between walking past a truck and grabbing something out of a bed and undoing a tonneau cover to grab something.

Tonneau covers also slightly help with drag, offering slightly better mileage for fuel