#PickupTrucks

With 29% and 30% of their U.S. sales coming from pickup trucks, respectively, General Motors and Ford Motor Company fall from the top two positions to the second and third when auto manufacturer sales are compared without pickups.

Toyota, therefore, becomes the top dog with 507,000 non-pickup sales through the first-quarter of 2015, 21,000 more cars, vans, SUVs, and crossovers than General Motors.

Excluding Frontiers, Titans, and Ridgelines doesn’t change the fact that Nissan and Infiniti are still outselling Honda and Acura. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles nearly pulls level with Ford MoCo when the Ram and dominant F-Series, America’s best-selling vehicle line, are left out of the equation.

Nissan’s new Navara pickup will spawn variants for both Renault and Mercedes-Benz, with the three trucks likely to be built at a new plant in Argentina.

The rapid ascent of the new Chevrolet Colorado finally slowed in March 2015 with month-to-month growth amounting to only 58 extra sales. Colorado volume has increased every month since the new truck arrived last fall, from 1491 units in its first full month of October to 6621 units in March.

But even with an overall pickup truck market that was 17% larger in March than in February, Colorado sales grew by just 0.9% during the same period.

Its twin, meanwhile, didn’t sell as often in March as it did in February, sliding from 2513 sales two months ago to 2434 last month.

Forecasts suggested that U.S. new vehicle sales would decline in March 2015, but the auto industry reported a slight uptick compared with March 2014. The moderate 0.5% improvement occurred despite a 4% passenger car sales decline and a 0.6% drop in full-size pickup truck sales.

• GM truck increase contrasts with overall GM decline

• Ram truck decrease contrasts with overall FCA improvement

Granted, the March decline for full-size trucks was slight; the F-Series, Ram, Tundra, and Titan decreases were nearly completely counteracted by a GM increase.

The Chevrolet Colorado is a good little truck, certainly sturdy enough, leading me to believe that it is a capable enabler of various human endeavors that involve catapulting, hurtling, or generally straining one’s body across hill, dale, snow-capped extremity and Ace Hardware parking lot alike.

But its obvious novelty—one that so enraptured a certain publication’s staff to bestow it a pair of calipers that will hardly strain the Colorado’s 1500lb-plus payload—lies in its rejection of the idea that every pickup truck must be the approximate size of a Normandy landing craft.

Recently I had to go pick up a pallet of mortar for a temporary job I was managing. My Suburban was not up to the task, and I didn’t want impossible-to-vacuum-while-still-getting-into-every-crack concrete dust sitting in my wife’s BMW X1 for the next decade. So I snagged the keys to a coworker’s 2015 Ram 2WD 1500 Quad Cab. I’ve driven Rams in the past, but this is my first interaction with the new ZF 8-speed transmission. It was introduced on the 2014 model year Rams, but the hardworking, good-looking editors here at TTAC elected to skip the launch to review another rented Ford Fusion Ecoboost[ Not true-DK].

General Motors has reported 28,218 sales of their new midsize trucks since the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon arrived late in September 2014. Sales of both trucks have increased every month since arriving at dealers. Colorado volume in February was 177% stronger than it was in November; Canyon sales shot up 194% during the same period.

Neither GM pickup is the top-selling non-full-size truck in America, however, nor can GM yet claim the title when their sales are combined. Since October, sales of the top-selling Toyota Tacoma have increased 10% to 64,093 units.

One year ago, when we began tracking the monthly market share movement in America’s full-size pickup truck sector, General Motors had just seen its February market share fall from 39% in February 2013 to 35% one year later. Their trucks were new, but GM’s volume wasn’t matching the heavily incentivized sales production of their predecessors.

The story is turned on its head one year later, as Ford’s transition into a new F-Series lineup has caused a slight slowdown in a booming category. Full-size truck volume jumped 8% in February 2015, but F-Series sales slid 1%. GM, on the other hand, reported 8811 more Chevrolet Silverado sales this February than last along with more than 900 extra GMC Sierra sales.

The pickup truck world’s consistent hold on the whole of American best seller’s podium is steadily tightening.

January 2015 was the fifth consecutive month in which all three of America’s best-selling vehicle lines were pickup trucks.

It’s nothing new for Americans to see the Ford F-Series atop the monthly leaderboard. Not since the Cash For Clunkers-fuelled August 2009 has the F-Series not been the top-selling vehicle line in America.

So said I earlier this week in my review of the updated 2015 Toyota Sienna, the only remaining all-wheel-drive minivan.

The Sienna was America’s top-selling minivan in each of the last three months. And although the accompanying chart displays its official EPA mileage ratings at 16/23 mpg on the city and highway, front-wheel-drive Siennas are rated at 18/25. Forget the 14.4 mpg we saw during our test. Temperatures were brutal, the vehicle spent much of its time idling as we attempted to clear it (along with every other car on the street) of multiple inches of ice, the city streets on which the Sienna spent most of its stay were mostly snow-covered, and the van was fresh off the assembly line.

But could we have reasonably expected more than 16 mpg in city driving? Not according to the EPA.

Although General Motors’ full-size truck twins failed to outsell the Ford F-Serie s in January 2015, GM still came out on top as the best-selling truck manufacturer in America last month.

In the previous five months, the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra had accomplished this feat on their own, outselling the F-Series by 939 units in August 2014, 7076 in September, 2120 in October, 6294 in November, and 6918 units in December 2014. (The F-Series outsold the Silverado/Sierra by 12,263 units in calendar year 2014 and the total GM pickup truck family by 1045 units.)

• Colorado/Canyon sales steadily rising

• 14 of GM pickup sales generated by midsize trucks

• Still not approaching historic levels

Fast forward to January, when pickup truck volume jumped 22% year-over-year and the F-Series’ core F-150 line became more available in new aluminum-intensive form, and GM’s bigger set of twins fell 5643 sales short of overtaking the F-Series for a sixth consecutive month. But viewed as a full-line pickup truck manufacturer, GM’s 42% YOY improvement to nearly 57,000 sales was more than enough to fend off Ranger-less Ford.

January 2015 was the first month since July of last year in which the Ford F-Series outsold GM’s full-size twins, the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra.

Between August and December, F-Series sales slid 3%, not unpredictably. As Ford became more firmly entrenched in the F-150 transition phase, sales perked up in January 2015. Rising just as quickly as the fast-growing overall full-size truck market, F-Series sales increased to the highest level since January 2004. (F-Series volume in January 2015 was nearly double what it was in January 2010.)

• Ford outsells GM twins for the first time since July

• GM increases market share, Ram loses market share

• Full-size trucks lose a small amount of market share to small/midsize trucks

Though outsold by the F-Series, it certainly wasn’t a bad month for the big GM trucks. Their market share improved by more than a full percentage point as the Silverado posted a 25% improvement to 36,106 units.

In the nameplate’s best-ever year, Nissan sold 86,945 Titans in the United States.

Nissan USA wants to sell 100,000 Titans annually when the new model, with its more extensive lineup, arrives for the 2016 model year.

• Titan sales declined 20% in 2014

• Titan volume peaked at 87K in 2005

• F-Series, GM, Ram combined for 1.9M full-size truck sales in 2014

A 15% uptick from that record-setting year – the Titan’s second full year in the U.S., 2005 – doesn’t sound like an insurmountable leap forward. But an increase to 100,000 units would represent a six-fold improvement over the Titan’s U.S. sales average from the last three years.

According to Automotive News, Nissan North America’s chairman, Jose Munoz, told a crowd at the J.D. Power Automotive Summit that their aspirations are “modest,” and that when it comes to the automaker’s expectations for the Titan, “We’re very bullish.”

But is it reasonable to expect that the Titan could penetrate the market with Toyota Tundra-like force?

The B&B’s only bet for buying a Jeep Wrangler pickup at the moment is to buy a Wrangler, then send it to a third-party for conversion. CEO Mike Manley says he’d love to have such a beast in his brand’s portfolio, as well, but there’s a hitch.

General Motors’ U.S. market share in the small/midsize truck category grew in December 2014 to 21.1% from 13.9% in November. According to inventory statistics from Automotive News, GM dealers had approximately 9400 Chevrolet Colorados and GMC Canyons in stock at the beginning of December.

• Tacoma and Frontier rising

• GM earning market share

• Small/midsize trucks account for 1/10 pickup sales

Yet a booming auto industry and a surging pickup market meant that even with this new level of competition from the GM midsize pickups, widely regarded as the modern members of the class, the Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier each posted 12% year-over-year improvements in December.