Please believe I intend no sarcasm whatsoever when I say that the lockable, collapsable, under-seat storage box is one of the most useful innovations on the . Even if you don’t have a gun to put in it.

Pickup trucks can carry more crap than another type of passenger car, because obviously. But people driving them quickly realize this massive surplus of space is almost useless in a whole lot of “everyday lugging” scenarios.

It’s great to be able to carry a haul of firewood or mulch or motorcycles in your truck. But what do you do with things like documents and groceries and gym clothes? In the bed it’d blow away or get lifted by some light-fingered pedestrian. I know you’re not sloppy enough to just toss stuff on your seats, so where is anything small actually going to go?

If you spec the under-seat storage option on the 2017 Ford Super Duty, you’ve got yourself a perfect little box for “sensitive items, firearms, or anything you want out of the way” as described by Ford at their satellite unveiling of the truck in Irvine, California this morning.

And since it folds up or down in seconds, you can still have that sweet flat-floor part of the truck cab for when you want to flip the seats up and load something large.

By large I mean huge, because there’s enough room behind the front seats of a four-door Super Duty to practice your golf swing in.

But back to the box, here’s how it works:

Flip up the rear seats.

Push the little tab on whichever side of the truck you’re standing.

Push the panel up, which becomes the box wall.

Drop the seats back down.

Stick your key in the slot on either side of the truck and lock the seats down if you so desire.

Ford’s PR rep assured us that the unit we were playing with was an “early build” to excuse any hangups in operation, but it seemed to work flawlessly even with a light touch.

If you’re going to say, “I could get through that dinky piece of plastic in two seconds with a screwdriver,” you might be right. But on the flipside it’s extremely tough to tell this storage box even exists even if you’re peering in the window, and I reckon just getting items out of sight does a lot to deter the kind of a-hole casual criminals who’d bust your window and snatch stuff.

With the seats down, you can’t really see this thing at all.

Worth mentioning that I’m not one hundred percent sure this case would be a legal means to carry a gun in every state, but it seems to satisfy the most universal regulations that require a thunderstick to be in a locked container. But whatever you want to put in Ford’s new storage box, it’s a really useful and well-executed innovation that I hope we start seeing in more trucks.

Images by the author, topshot via graphics from Ford and FLA75047/Flickr

Andrew’s the off-road and adventure guy here at Jalopnik. Shoot him an email at or hit him up on to talk trucks.