Shopping for the coolest tonneau cover for your truck? Then you’ll want to look beyond the usual comparisons of how various cover types function (roll-up, folding, retractable, one-piece), and try to match or enhance your pickup’s visual styling, too.

Don't Let Your Truck Fall Flat

“Styling” is an aesthetic balance defined by shape, texture, and color. When it comes to pickup trucks, style is never flat. Just look at your truck. Its styling is based on a series of appealing curved surfaces, which define its body to give it a unique, stylish look. This absence of flat surfaces is no accident. The truck’s designers know the aesthetic and emotional power this curved styling has.

So What Are Your Cover Style Options Today?

Knowing how manufacturers style trucks, you can compare not only how different tonneau covers work, but also how good each looks with your truck’s styling. Imagine how a truck built with only flat panels would look: Drab and uninteresting—anything but special. Would you really want a bed cover like that? And yet, whatever type you call them, most of today’s tonneau cover designs are just variations of Flat.

Let’s compare how the most common designs match up with the truck’s bed rail cover.

The cross-sectional views below are closeups of the circled area in this truck box.

Perched

The perched design is common to base folding covers, and simply consists of placing a rectangular-shaped panel on top of the truck bed rails.

Flat

Some folding covers and most retractables are configured this way. This approach seeks to match the cover up to the surface of the truck bed rails in an effort to generate an extended flat surface across the truck box.

Toupee

For a one-piece cover to pivot and have sufficient clearance to the side of the truck, the panel must extend out into space, giving it a toupee-like appearance.

Angular

The angular look is typical of welded aluminum frames.

Integrated

The Stowe approach is to complement the styling of the truck body. The rails are designed as an extension of the body curves, creating a smooth transition to the panel covering the box. The eye sees this as an appealing, finished, integrated look.

The Stowe No-Compromise Tonneau Cover System

As you can see, the styling of the Stowe system works with the contours of your truck’s sheet metal to give the truck and cover a unified, integrated feel. The fit of the frame rails to the edge of the truck box, and their contoured shape, are matched to the contour of the truck panels, providing a seamless transition to the top panel surface.

We coat the top surface of every tonneau cover panel with custom-grained automotive-grade urethane (polyurea) to match the look and feel of the tonneau frame rails, as well as the truck bed rail covers. We then apply an additional topcoat to the polyurea surface to protect against sun fade.