Who’s Acela?

Enter Acela Truck Company out of Bozeman, Montana. It’s been refurbishing and enhancing ex-military Stewart & Stevenson 2.5-ton 4x4 and 5-ton 6x6 FMTV trucks for years and offering them to fire departments, utilities, mining operations, overlanders, and more as extreme off-road-capable work trucks. Now, they’ve moved into the midsize pickup truck market.

It’s a big swing, but Acela may have just spotted a hole in the market. Every state and local government has fleets of full-size pickups because they can be outfitted with any manner of accessory up to and including job-specific beds and boxes. You can do that with midsize trucks, too, but not in a single cab long bed configuration. Your only other alternative is a side-by-side, and that comes with its own drawbacks (street legality, safety, top speed, comfort, etc.). This is where Acela went to work.

Meet the Dispatcher 4x4

The only way you’re turning a four-door cab into a two-door cab is with a Sawzall or similar, so given you’re going to have to replace the part you cut off, you want to make it as easy as possible. A body-on-frame pickup is the obvious choice as cutting up the cab doesn’t affect the frame, but even then, there are roadblocks. Slicing up a unibody cab jeopardizes its rollover protection. This is where the Jeep Gladiator comes in.

Because the Jeep’s roof is removable, the rollover hoop is a separate piece that stays in place when the top comes off. Legally, it’s there to protect people in seats, so when Acela removes the back seats, it’s OK to remove the back half of the roll cage as well since there’s no one to protect. With the back half of the cab gone, it’s as simple as plugging the hole.

This is no slapdash camper shell, either. Acela worked with Jeep engineers for a year to create a single SMC composite piece which acts as part of the roof and sides of the vehicle, plus the rear window and wall. Acela cuts the standard Gladiator cab in half just behind the front doors and permanently attaches its rear cab while preserving the removable front roof panels and creating an 18-inch-deep storage area behind the rear seats. Yes, you can still remove the doors, and yes, that technically makes it an extended cab, not a single cab.

Acela doesn’t touch any of the airbags or any mechanical systems when it hacks off the back of the cab and tosses the rear seats, so the Dispatcher retains its factory warranty. The company is testing the stock stability control system and airbags post-conversion to determine whether any software update is required to account for the lighter curb weight and altered center of gravity as the Dispatcher is about 1,000 pounds lighter than a stock Gladiator.

The inside of the rear cab is finished in black ABS plastic over sound-deadening material like a stock Gladiator. The factory electronics mounted to the back wall of the cab are reinstalled in the same space on the new back wall. It also retains the factory rear window with defrost and sliding center section.

As a result of losing three-fifths of the seating capacity, Acela is able to offer the Dispatcher as a chassis cab or with an optional seven-foot Tafco aluminum drop-side flatbed. That’s a full two feet longer than the stock bed, a few inches wider at five full feet, and with no pesky wheelwells to get in the way of whatever you want to carry back there. L-track tie-downs are optional and if you’d like to retain the factory blind-spot monitoring system, Acela will relocate the sensors from the taillights into custom housings.

Is it perfect? Not quite, but how much do you care? The rear side windows don’t match the design of the front windows and don’t line up with them. The new back of the cab overhangs where the old back of the cab was cut off and looks a bit awkward from the side. Going to an aftermarket bed for now means losing the factory taillights, but that’s no big loss.