Battle Of The BOFs: All-Out War For Full-Size Trucks Impending
Are you in the market for a full-size pickup? Hold your fire. With a little patience, you can profiteer from an all-out Battle of the BOFs. It’s a fight for your money, and for delivering optimistic 2012 sales goals. The noise you hear outside are the winds of war: GM not only missed its truck sales goals in November, it also sits atop a 4 ½ month supply of full-size pickups taking up space (and cash) at dealer lots. “We’ll continue to use all levers to influence inventory…,” said Kurt McNeil, GM’s VP of U.S. sales. “That includes first and foremost adjusting production and marketing activity.” Translation: Shutdowns and cash on the hood.
GM’s pickup truck inventory is “much higher than the less-than-100-day supply considered ideal for full-size pickups,” says the Detroit News , a publication untainted by suspicion of anti-GM bias. We have been saying this for months, but who’s listening to us? Well, nadude does. Even the DetN is growing dubious of the canard that the trucks are piled high to compensate for downtime at plants that transition to new 2014 Chevy Silverados and GMC Sierras. The DetN thinks that GM will have to offer bigger incentives to move the metal, and that the lieutenants at the General are “looking at possible production cuts.”
The first skirmishes were fought in November. After an artillery barrage of what GM called “unexpectedly high” incentives on 2012 pickups by Chrysler and Ford, Ram pickup sales exploded by 23 percent last month, Ford’s F-series wooshed 17.9 percent higher. GM did not return fire. Result: GM’s total truck sales lost 11 percent, full-size truck sales were down 8 percent.
“I imagine GM will be very aggressive spenders in December to end the year on a high note,” said Jessica Caldwell of Edmunds.
Agreed. And since the other guys are no dummies, TTAC expects a happy exchange of counter-battery fire. Not of the electric kind.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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2013 Ram is Motor Trend truck of the year! Ford is the one with no answer to Ram's 25 mpg Pentastar and when the Hemi 8 speed gets here it is supposed to beat the EcoBoost's gas mileage! Think about this, the Pentastar Ram beats a V6 Toy truck Tacoma in gas mileage and ties the 4 cylinder automatic Tacoma. America now makes the most efficient trucks!
We own a 2011 Silverado crew cab. Not because we constantly need a truck, but because the head room is plentiful compared to the "sloping roofline" rear seats in most family sedans today. There is plenty of leg room in the truck, too. Add that to the fact that most SUVs today are oppressively expensive to purchase and do not get that much better fuel economy. We bought the truck brand new for just under what a base model equinox would have cost.