Daimler Says This Year’s Sales to Top 2011 But Won’t Match Industry’s Expectations

This story appears in the Aug. 13 print edition of Transport Topics.

YOUNTVILLE, Calif. — The head of sales and marketing for Daimler Trucks North America said 2012 is likely to end up as a “disappointing year” in general but that sales would exceed 2011’s total.

Mark Lampert, senior vice president of sales and marketing for the largest truck maker in North America, said this year will be profitable and reasonably strong but would fall short of the high expectations most original equipment manufacturers had felt when 2012 began.

While freight growth is sluggish and U.S. consumption is down, Lampert said, it was “still a pretty good marketplace” for heavy-duty trucks, as fleets continue to replace the vehicles they held onto longer than usual, owing to the recession.

But OEMs had looked forward to a boom year after 2011’s strong recovery, he said, and that is not going to happen.

Lampert spoke at a meeting with journalists here, as DTNA made its Freightliner Cascadia Evolution model available for the first press test drives and released more details about

its new DT12 automated manual transmission.Company officials also unveiled a new website de-signed to aid small fleets, drivers and owner-operators, under a program it calls “Team Run Smart.”

Lampert said that “we remain cautiously optimistic” that 2012 will end fairly well, with U.S. sales “somewhere around 185,000 units,” compared with about 171,000 last year.

He also said he was surprised by how much interest has been shown in natural gas-powered trucks. He and CEO Martin Daum recently toured 13 of their dealers, Lampert said, and “everyone wanted to know what was going on with natural gas.”

He said it was the top single topic the dealers raised and he believed it was driven by the huge cost advantage for natural gas compared with diesel.

But Lampert said that natural gas was unlikely to account for any substantial portion of Class 8 truck sales for years to come, in part because of infrastructure constraints that limit the areas where fleets can rely on natural gas.

He said Freightliner’s move to increase its presence in vocational markets has been successful, with market share among Classes 6-8 vocationals up to 24.8% this year, versus 13.4% in 2007.

Richard Saward, general manager of vocational sales, told reporters that Freightliner has “made great progress” toward the stated goal to be the market leader by 2015.

Unlike in the heavy-duty segment, natural gas is quickly becoming a force in the vocational markets, said Richard Shearing, director of product strategy. He said it could be powering up to half of the new vehicles sold in that segment in coming years.

Meanwhile, journalists were treated to rides in the Evolution, Daimler’s new model that it predicts will be about 7% more fuel-efficient than its 2010 model of the same truck.

The gains come from aerodynamic improvements, the new transmission and refinements in the engine.

Brad Williamson, marketing manager for powertrain, told reporters that the DT12 transmission will carry a five-year, 750,000-mile warranty and will improve performance on Freightliner’s trucks because it will be part of an integrated drivetrain designed to work together for maximum performance.

Williamson said the transmission improves fuel efficiency over what most drivers can obtain manually by shifting gears at the precise moment to maximize fuel use.

Company officials also said the “Team Run Smart”

program is designed to help smaller fleets and owner-operators improve operations by providing tools to deal with the elements of the business that don’t involve driving the trucks, such as maintenance, accounting, regulations and health.

David Hames, general manager of marketing, said the number of owner-operators is growing after several years of decline but that the segment is under increased financial pressures from the hours-of-service rule and the decline in the average length of haul.

The program offers advice to any driver through its website, www.teamrunsmart.com.