Medium-Duty Truck Sales Drop Nearly 30% in August
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U.S. medium-duty truck sales continued to trend below the prior year by dropping nearly 30% in August, according to data from Wards Intelligence.
Classes 4-7 retail truck sales for the month decreased 28.2% to 16,359 units from 22,797 a year earlier. Monthly sales figures have been mostly down year over year since May 2024. The latest sales figures also showed a sequential 4.9% decrease from the 17,204 units reported in July.
“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” said ACT Research Vice President Steve Tam. “In fact, my litmus test is to just take a look at what our forecast is. We’re looking for about a 7% to 8% decline in retail sales this year in the U.S. market for Classes 5 to 7, and the numbers you just shared are sitting at about minus 8% year to date. So the industry is kind of playing out the script that we assume it’s going to be following for the remainder of the year.”
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Tam noted that the driving factors are similar to what has been impacting heavy-duty truck sales: a lack of freight growth and a lot of uncertainty, with inflation playing a big role as well.
“It is probably more inflation related than anything else,” Tam said. “I think the thing that a lot of folks don’t appreciate, or they’ve forgotten that they know, is we saw some pretty strong price appreciation in 2024, and we have not seen deflation. We have not seen prices come back down. So when we talk about lower inflation, we’re just talking about already high prices rising at a slower rate. Which still has the effect of, if you’ve got a fixed budget, you can buy less, which ultimately is less freight or fewer services or whatever the case may be.”
RELATED: July Class 8 Truck Sales Return to Year-Over-Year Losses
Wards data showed a year-over-year decrease for each medium-duty class. Class 7 truck sales decreased 16.8% to 5,352 from 6,433. Class 6 declined 24.9% to 4,944 from 6,584. Class 5 showed a decrease of 37.7% to 4,896 from 7,860. Class 4 fell 39.2% to 1,167 units from 1,920. International reported the most Class 7 sales at 2,400 units. Ford sold the most Class 6 trucks with 1,966 and Class 5 at 2,903. Isuzu sold the most Class 4 units at 793.
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“You see a deterioration in how sales are holding up in the latest month compared to the year to date,” said Dan Moyer, senior analyst of commercial vehicles at FTR Transportation Intelligence. “So it’s kind of the same story. ... Just similar pressures, uncertainty, tariffs, cost pressure, freight demand.”
Moyer added that the freight market has just not been improving in the ways people have hoped for a while now, whether that be freight volume or rates. He pointed to tariffs and the associated economic freight market uncertainties as being a major driver across commercial vehicle segments.
“There’s no escaping the impacts, and it’s causing demand deterioration,” Moyer said. “Some markets or segments are holding up better than others. But you’re seeing it where we have data on orders and on retail stats, in recent months, year to date, the last three, four or five months ... you’re seeing demand deterioration, all in the face of pretty high inventories for medium duty, near record levels of inventory for Class 8 and this is for North America.”
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