Cain's Segments, May 2014: Trucks

Ford is in a transition phase: readying the new 2015 F-150 while trying to sell the old model as often as possible. This requires knowing just how many F-Series pickups dealers will need in the weeks leading up to the new model’s introduction.

Too few is a problem, as is too many. Of course, Ford has experience in this arena. They’ve restructured plants before, they’ve forecasted summer truck sales for outgoing trucks before, they’ve done so while continuing to play a major role in America’s truck market before. But we can still expect to see some fluctuation in the figures put up by America’s best-selling vehicle line.

Indeed, May F-Series sales fell by 3084 units. Where did those buyers go? General Motors added 3365 Chevrolet Silverado sales and 2265 GMC Sierra sales compared with May 2013, Chrysler said Ram truck sales grew by 5459 units, and Toyota reported an extra 1441 Tundra sales.

In other words, a handful of potential F-Series buyers may have headed elsewhere – and they could just be waiting – but the truck market added thousands of buyers last month. America’s full-size truck segment grew by more than 5%, or 9210 units, in May 2014. Year-to-date sales are up 6%, or 45,469 units.

At this point last year, six full-size truck nameplates accounted for 87% of the pickups sold in the first five months of 2013. They’ve moved that figure forward to 89% in 2014; 89.3% during the month of May specifically.

Compared with the first five months of 2013, GM and Ford have both lost 1.5 percentage points of market share in the category. Fears that GM’s new trucks couldn’t take advantage of what would inevitably be a more challenging start to the year for Ford have been set aside, to a degree, over the last couple of months, as Silverado/Sierra market share held steady in April (on a year-over-year basis) and improved in May, both on a year-over-year basis and compared with April.

Ram and Toyota are more expertly capitalizing on the opportunity, at least from a purely volume-oriented perspective. Ram’s share of the full-size truck segment has grown by nearly three percentage points as volume has shot up by more than 30,000 units over the last five months. Toyota has added 7204 Tundra sales so far this year.

During the first five months of the Tundra’s best ever calendar year, 2007, the Tundra generated 6.9% of the sales produced by these six trucks. (GM’s share was 39.6%; Ford’s was 32.8%. The full-size market itself was 10% bigger than it has been so far this year.) Toyota isn’t going to sell 196,555 Tundras in 2014 like they did in 2013, but the brand is rapidly moving back to those kinds of market share levels.

Ram’s move up the ladder is impressive, but it pales in comparison to what they’ve accomplished in Canada. 29.5% of the full-size trucks sold in Canada so far this year have been Rams. GM Canada’s twins trail the Ram P/U lineup by 3026 units heading into June.

Unworthy of mention now that GM has all but extinguished the last of its inventory, the Chevrolet Avalanche outsold the Nissan Titan by 578 units in May of last year. Cadillac sold three Escalade EXTs in May 2014; Chevrolet reported a single Avalanche sale.