You don’t often see a pickup without a bed liner of some sort and it’s a good thing. Leave the bed unprotected and very quickly it gets dented and scratched and if you really get rough with it, you’ll start to see rust. Not good. But trucks are made to work, that bed back there is supposed to carry things so you might want to think about what you normally carry and then protect it accordingly.
In my truck, I installed a BedRug. When people see it for the first time they don’t know what to think. The Bedrug looks just like the carpeting or lining you usually see in a car’s trunk, but it’s tough as nails and doesn’t absorb water, oil or most of the other stuff you might spill on it. When it gets dirty, you sweep it off or use your shop vac and it looks good as new.
The Bedrug has a molded foam backing that is precisely made to fit each specific truck. The bottom is molded to fit between the ribs of the bed so the surface is flat. If you ever have to crawl around back there on your knees, they’ll thank you for it. It makes the Bedrug ideal if you ever carry your kids or a dog back there and if you ever load up with something a bit more delicate than concrete blocks, you won’t have to worry about eveything getting scratched. Put a cap on your truck and you have the perfect spot to roll out a sleeping bag for camping.
The Bedrug comes in two pieces, one wraps around the side of the bed and the other covers the floor and tailgate. They are connected with a very heavy duty zipper. One thing I can say is you’ll want to lay both pieces out in the sun for a little while to make them easier to work with, if they get too cold it’s hard to fit everything together and lay it in the bed properly. Everything is held in place with a lot of heavy duty Velcro.
Because the foam backing is made from a direct mold of the bed, all of the locations where tie downs and other fasteners are located are very apparent and you can poke holes in the exact spot to screw everything back in place. If you have a bed extender, the grommets where the locking pins go are easily replaced.
If you have a bed cover, the back of your truck is now an oversized trunk. My wife loves it when we go shopping. The bed extender, when flipped inside the bed keeps everything in place so it doesn’t slide up to the front.
Now, one qualifier here, if you do nothing but heavy construction and your pickup carries nothing but very heavy and dirty equipment, the Bedrug is not for you. You would be better off with one of the spray on liners. But a lot of us don’t beat up our trucks that much and the Bedrug works perfectly. By the way, the new Lincoln pickup comes with a Bedrug so you know it’s a high quality product. I really like mine. If you haven’t thought about one for any reason, I would encourage you to do so. They’re really nice.