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.