bed length, cab, axle ratio and the tow package: reading a repo pickup listing before you bid

this is a better question than most of what gets asked on the big forums, so here is the whole method the way i would explain it standing at the service desk. it is all one answer: stop reading the words and find the labels.

the cab. on a Ford, SuperCab is the one with the small rear doors and no separate door handle out front, and SuperCrew is four full doors. the giveaway in a photo is the rear door window and where the handle sits. on a GM, double cab is the small one and crew cab is the big one, and a Ram quad cab is the small one. four words, two trucks, you had it right.

the box. ask the seller for one photo straight down the side of the truck from about twenty feet. on a four full door truck, a short box looks short and a long box puts the rear wheel noticeably further back from the cab. that is a terrible answer, so here is the good one: the original window sticker lists the box, and any Ford dealer can print the window sticker from a VIN. i do it for people on the phone. a lot of dealers will email it to you if you ask politely and do not sound like you are shopping them.

the axle. open the driver's door in the photos and look at the certification label on the jamb, the white or silver one, not the yellow payload one. there is a small box on it marked AXLE with a two character code. that code is the ratio and whether it is a limited slip. the code list changes by model year so do not guess off a chart you found in 2011, read the code and hand it to a parts counter. this is the single most useful photograph you can ask any seller for and almost nobody asks for it.

the tow package. you are right to be suspicious, a hitch is not a package. on an F-150 the real max trailer tow package brings the bigger rear bumper, the 36 gallon tank, the integrated trailer brake controller and the lower axle ratio. you can see the controller in any dashboard photo: it is a knob down to the left of the steering wheel, below the headlight switch, and on a truck without it there is a blank there. no knob, no factory tow package, no matter what the listing says.

two more while you are in there. the eighth character of a Ford VIN is the engine, so get a clear photo of the jamb label or the dash VIN and let somebody read it rather than trusting a badge, because badges get swapped and door panels get replaced. and the yellow sticker on the same jamb is the payload, which we beat to death over in the payload thread and which matters more than any of this once you put a trailer on it.

wendell covered the mechanics. i will give you the order i look at photographs in, because i buy thirty some trucks a year off photographs and i have gotten faster at it by being wrong a few times.

first four photos i open, every time: the driver's door jamb, the dash with the odometer and the warning lights, the bed floor with any mat pulled back, and the front of the truck straight on at bumper height. the jamb tells me what it is, the dash tells me whether anything is lit up, the bed floor tells me what the truck did for a living and the nose tells me what it hit and what the previous owner did not fix.

then: all four tires, close, including the sidewall and not just the tread. the front seat bottom and the pedals, which age with a truck more honestly than the odometer does. the rear axle tag. the hitch receiver, because a receiver with a wallowed out hole and shiny paint on the ball mount means that truck pulled something heavy a lot. and the exhaust tip, because a truck that idled on a lease road all its life has a different tailpipe than a commuter truck.

what i do not care about and neither should you at 28 to 32 thousand: the touchscreen size, the wheel finish, the color of the stitching, and whether somebody put a chrome step on it. you can buy a truck that is wrong for you in a color you like, and people do it weekly.

and one piece of discipline. write down what the truck has to be, before you look at any listing. crew cab, four wheel drive, payload over 1,700, factory brake controller, under 90,000 miles. tape it to the monitor. anything that misses one line does not get a bid, no matter how good the picture of the grille is. that single habit has saved me more money than any negotiating i have ever done.

i did exactly this in may on the Lariat i bought, so here is what it looks like in practice rather than in theory.

the listing had 54 photographs and the door jamb was in two of them, close enough to read both labels, which i now understand is the seller doing you a favor whether they know it or not. i asked the m&a people for four more: the hitch receiver, the driver's seat bolster, the back of the rear seats and the dash where the brake controller sits. four pictures, next afternoon, no attitude about it. that is 20 minutes of somebody's day and it is the difference between bidding and guessing.

after i won it i had the Ford store print the original window sticker off the VIN, which took the parts guy about a minute, and it told me things the listing never would have: which package it left the factory with, the original tire size, and that it was sold new in Tennessee, which explains why a four year old truck has no rust on it and is most of why i wanted it.

the one i would add to wendell's list. ask for a photograph of the back of the rear seats, folded up. that is where a work truck hides what it actually was. mine had two small tears in the carpet behind the seat from a toolbox and nothing else, and the man who had it before me clearly drove it to an office. a truck with the back seat beat to death and the headliner stained above the rear doors lived a different life than the mileage says.

since both of the techs in here are Ford people, let me put the GM half down for whoever searches this later, because i just did it in June on a Silverado from a lender yard.

on a GM truck there is a sticker inside the glovebox door, sometimes in the console lid, that lists every option the truck was built with as a three character code. that is the build sheet and it is the whole ballgame. the ones that matter on a 1500: NHT is the max trailering package, G80 is the locking rear differential, Z71 is the off road suspension, and the axle has its own code that a parts man can read in a second. my parts guy says GU4 is the 3.23 and GU6 is the 3.42, and i would still rather he read the actual code than take my word for it in print.

why it matters more on a Chevy than a Ford right now. people list any Silverado with black badges and black wheels as a Trail Boss, because it looks like one. a real Trail Boss has the factory 2 inch lift, the Z71 hardware, the Duratracs and a badge on the bedside, and it carries less payload than a plain LT because of all that. if you want one, get the glovebox photo. if somebody will not send you the glovebox photo, that tells you something too.

one last thing on buying this way with a deadline over your head, which is what i did. the m&a auto sales lots that have a Buy Now number on them let you skip the whole bid and wait, and that has a price, and i wrote about what it cost me in my own thread rather than hijacking this one. read it before you decide you are in a hurry.