Although the F-Series pickup is still the best, Japanese trucks are in serious trouble.
2020 is here, and Ford’s 2019 sales figures are finally out. We can now dive deep into the pickup truck war between Blue Oval, Ram, Bow Tie, Ram and Japanese competitors Toyota, Nissan, and the ever-expanding pickup truck market. These stats show that trucks still dominate the U.S. market. However, some brands are clearly better than others.
For literally decades, the Ford F-Series has been this segment’s undisputed champion. 2019 was no different. In 2019, 896,526 full-size trucks were sold. This is a significant increase on the previous year’s results. That includes combined sale of the Chevrolet Silverado as well as the GMC Sierra. This means that you can guess which truck ended up in second place.
Ram has been a huge seller in all iterations. For 2019, 633,694 trucks sold. This is an 18% increase over the previous year. This is a remarkable performance. Ram not only beat Silverado for second place, but it also surpassed it. It was also the only full-size truck with double-digit sales growth in 2019. While there is still a significant gap between Ram trucks and F-Series trucks, Ford truck and truck sales were slightly lower for the year – 1.4 per cent.
General Motors also boasts the second-best-selling full size truck lineup. GMC Sierra and Chevrolet Silverado (including medium-duty Silverados), were combined to create 807,923 new GM trucks for 2019. Silverado sales were 575,600 units, while GMC sold 223,323 Sierras.
The Japanese offerings continue to fall behind Detroit’s iron. Nissan is particularly in trouble with its Titan which saw just 31,514 sales all for 2019, a 37.5 percent decline over the previous year. Toyota Tundrasales fell 5.6 percent in 2019, but this is still more than the F-Series sales Ford sees in a month.
What does all this mean? We’ve seen new vehicle sales slow in the second half of 2019, however, all four full-size trucks manufactured by U.S. automakers saw year-over-year increases for December. This suggests that they are bucking the trend. Both Ram and GM have updated their models recently compared to Ford’s older F-Series. However, if sales numbers are any indication buyers are more interested in Ram’s new handsome look than the controversial Silverado or Sierra designs.
Ram’s controversial sales are a must-see when discussing truck sales. In September , FCA was fined $40 million for inflating sales figures between 2012 and 2016. This doesn’t apply to 2019, but GM was still critical of the automaker in September for its inflated sales stats between 2012 and 2016.
In any case, the chart above shows how 2019 ended up for full-size trucks. A new Ford F-150 The next year, which is expected to be later in 2020 should prove to be interesting