Big families get extended ride

Stretch Truck adds row of doors, seats to trucks and SUVs to ease growth.

Larry Edsall / Special to The Detroit News

We’ve all seen those hideously stretched sport utility limousines. And while Stretch Truck Co. stretches pickup trucks and SUVs, adding a row of doors and two or three seats, the idea is different.

The Denver company is looking to meet the needs of industry or families, not the egos of entertainers or athletes.

"They’re utilitarian, but they’re also cool," says Damon Carlson, marketing manager for Stretch Truck.

Among Stretch Truck’s customers are friends of Carlson and his family — friends who realized when their eighth child was born that they were looking at traveling in two vehicles or in a 15-seat passenger van, a vehicle that does not have the best reputation when it comes to protecting occupants in worst-case scenarios.

Stretch Truck has a staff of half a dozen people whose background is in automotive salvage, so they had extensive experience in doing frame and body work. They saw stretched trucks as "a natural off-shoot," Carlson said.

Their idea was to meet the needs of a niche market by extending frames enough to fit in another set of doors and another row of seats. Thus, an SUV or crew cab becomes a six-door vehicle with seating for nearly a dozen people, whether a family is going to dinner or a construction crew heading to a work site.

The process adds about 500 pounds to the vehicle’s curb weight, or as Carlson puts it, "a couple bales of hay in the farming world."

Carlson says Stretch Truck has produced a dozen such convrsions. Stretch Truck generally starts with a year- or 2-year-old vehicle, but can do its work on a new vehicle as well. A typical stretch — including all the interior work — runs in the neighborhood of $20,000 (if the customer supplies the vehicle), or in the $45,000 to $65,000 range for a turn-key project with Stretch Truck procuring the vehicle.

It typically takes four to six weeks for Stretch Truck to complete each conversion.