December Medium-Duty Sales Continued to Trend Below 2023
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U.S. retail sales of medium-duty trucks declined year-over-year despite a sequential increase in December, according to data from Wards Intelligence.
Classes 4-7 retail truck sales for the month declined 1.2% to 22,586 units from 22,857 a year ago. But sales also were 20% higher sequentially from 18,828 reported in November. The latest results continued the trend of the back end of this year being outpaced by 2023. But this was only after a relatively strong start when it came to year-over-year results.
“A lot of it depends on who the customer is,” ACT Research Vice President Steve Tam said. “You have to think about, as people buy specific chassis for specific reasons, not knowing necessarily all the intricate ins and outs of how that works. We kind of default and step back and take a big picture, look, and go, ‘Classes 6 to 7, gosh, they were up a whopping 1%, not even, for the year.’ ”
Tam added that this rate of growth was expected given that the medium-duty side faces even more challenges than its heavy-duty counterpart because a lot more vehicles have to go through an uplifting process before they can be delivered to the customers.
Tam
“We still have high backlogs,” Tam said. “We think demand is very solid, but we also think that anybody that wants a truck either has it ordered, so it’s in backlog, or it’s in the works. So we’re not going to see huge numbers as far as order intake is concerned.
“We’re going to see pretty decent solid sales. But production numbers, what actually goes down the assembly line this year, is probably going to get pretty dented.”
Tam expects inventories to steadily shrink throughout the year as the truck manufacturers work through them. He also noted that it might depend on what transpires politically as Donald Trump is sworn in as president.
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“A lot of it’s going to depend on what happens from a political perspective, or the impact of the vertical policy decisions on commerce and business and that sort of thing,” Tam said. “I think most of the industry is pretty optimistic that things are going to go well. But one of the caveats, one of the things that we’re keeping a very close eye on, and it’s difficult to quantify the impact of, we’ve heard the incoming administration say they want to put tariffs on imports. That’s all well and fine. But if you go back and look at history, tariffs are inflationary, and inflation is not a friend to economic growth.”
The results showed that sales more so favored the heavier end of the medium-duty space. Class 7 increased 21.6% year over year to 5,347 units from 4,396, and Class 6 increased 17.3% to 7,414 units from 6,320. Classes 4-5, though, fell 19.1% to 9,825 units from 12,141.
Freightliner, a brand of Daimler Truck North America, sold the most Class 7 trucks during the month at 2,124. Ford sold the most Class 6 vehicles at 1,975 units and the most in Class 5 at 4,281. Isuzu sold the most Class 4 trucks at 1,077.
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