An employee works on a truck at a VTNA plant. (Justin Ide/Bloomberg News)
U.S. Class 8 retail sales in June rose 7.7% compared with the year-ago period, but slid marginally compared with May, according to Wards Intelligence.
Class 8 sales for the month totaled 24,085 units, up from 22,358 in June 2022 and down 0.1% from the 24,111 sold in May. In the first half of 2023, Class 8 sales rose 21% to 135,802 from 112,255 in the same period in 2022.
Daimler Truck North America’s Freightliner brand took the largest market share with 8,991 trucks sold in June, accounting for 37.3% of all sales in the most recent month, compared with 8,129 trucks in the same period a year earlier.
Western Star, also a DTNA brand, sold 734 trucks in June, for a 3% market share. Western Star posted the largest year-over-year percentage increase in sales, jumping 62.7% from 451 trucks in June 2022.
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Five out of the top seven brands saw a year-over-year increase in sales, according to Wards data.
Navistar’s International brand sold 3,426 trucks in June, a jump of 17% compared with 2,927 in the year-ago period.
Two brands saw year-on-year declines in sales. Volvo Trucks North America — a unit of Volvo Group — saw sales fall 10.3% year-over-year to 2,403 trucks from 2,679 in June 2022, while Paccar Inc.’s Peterbilt unit saw sales drop 5.1% year-over-year to 3,243 trucks from 3,418, the data shows.
Mack Trucks, also part of VTNA, saw sales increase 11.8% year-on-year in June to 1,744 from 1,560. Kenworth, Paccar’s other brand, posted a 10% year-over-year jump in sales to 3,512 trucks in June from 3,194, the data shows, for a 14.6% share of the market, the second largest slice of the pie. A month earlier, the company was third in the rankings with a 13.3% market share.
