April Medium-Duty Truck Sales Drop 8.8% From Last Year
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U.S. sales for medium-duty trucks continued to trend below the prior-year period in April, according to data from Wards Intelligence.
Classes 4-7 retail truck sales for the month decreased 8.8% to 18,754 units from 20,564 a year earlier. Medium-duty truck sales also decreased 6% sequentially from the 19,942 units reported in March. Medium-duty sales have been generally trending below the prior year since May 2024, though there have been a few exceptions, such as January’s 5.2% increase.
“We have similar expectations for slowing, at least for Classes 5 to 7,” ACT Research Vice President Steve Tam said. “Class 4 is really kind of the wild card here. And given that Isuzu and Hino to some degree are significant players in that space, you can’t help but wonder if this is somehow tariff related. I know they’ve put a lot of things in place, I don’t profess to fully understand everything, but I know that they’re bringing a lot of incomplete vehicles into the country and doing final assembly here too, and that goes back to avoiding the Chicken Tax.”
The Chicken Tax is a 25% tariff on light trucks aimed at giving domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors. But an unintended consequence of this tariff scheme has been a fairly commonplace practice of circumventing penalties with loopholes, like importing a nearly finished vehicle to be completed domestically.
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“If you think about where they have footholds for the brand, they tend to be more East- and West Coast-focused,” Tam said. “And inasmuch as California is struggling the way it is, and you have a situation, at least up until now, where you’ve got Advanced Clean Truck legislation in there, not having electric commercial vehicles to sell is limiting the number of [internal combustion engine] medium-duty vehicles that you’re able to sell into the marketplace.”
Class 7 truck sales increased 3.4% to 4,799 units from 4,643. Class 6 sales declined 3.7% to 5,966 units from 6,196. Classes 4 and 5 sales decreased 17.9% to 7,989 units from 9,725. Freightliner, a brand of Daimler Truck North America, reported the most Class 7 sales at 2,236 units. Ford sold the most Class 6 vehicles at 2,158 units and the most Class 5 vehicles at 3,774 units. Isuzu led Class 4 with 833 trucks.
“The steel and aluminum tariff is one that’s definitely hitting us, and that’s across classes, though it’s probably disproportionate, again, on the lighter side because there’s probably a heavier content,” Tam said. “So if you’re looking at a $3,000 to $5,000 tariff on steel and aluminum, as a percentage of the price of the vehicle, it’s much higher on the lighter vehicles.”
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