As our Brazilian friend Stingray pointed out in today’s Curbside Classic thread, the FWD trucklet isn’t dead… it’s on vacation in South America. And new models are arriving all the time. This May, the popular Brazilian-market models Stingray lists below will be joined by the Peugeot Hoggar Escapade, a 207-based compact truck with the best name to come out of PSA since Bipper Tepee. Fun fact: with a maximum engine displacement of 1.6 liters pulling a 1,650 lb max payload, it actually carries more weight per liter of displacement than the latest generation of the Silverado Heavy Duty (6,335 lbs with the 6.6 liter Duramax).
Ford’s facing one of the toughest challenges in automotive product planning: how to offer the competitive compact pickup consumers say they want without cannibalizing far more profitable full-sized trucks. The solution? Don’t offer a competitive compact pickup. “It’s no secret we have a new Ranger coming globally. We’re working on one for all the other markets in the world,” Ford’s Derrick Kuzak tells Pickuptrucks.com. “The difference is that all of those other markets only have a Ranger. They don’t have an F-150 above it.” See how that works? But don’t worry, Ranger fans. Ford has your effete, pathetic backs…
Truck marketing is so out of ideas. Despite a few hesitant signs that the old “bigger, stronger, butcher” paradigm might be giving way to less primitive appeals to consumers, GM’s Tom Stephens has dragged truck marketing back to the stone age, issueing the following challenge to Ford [via Pickuptrucks.com].
You’re going to love our new diesel Duramax engine in the new Heavy Duty. You know what I want to do to prove it? I want to take our truck and Ford’s [new Super Duty] and chain them together back -to-back. Then I want to have them pull against each other. I know our truck will beat theirs.
Pickuptrucks.com has passed the memo on to Ford, in hopes of spawning a “V-Series Challenge”-type media stunt. Too bad it will never happen. When the trucks are evenly-matched, these contests tend to come down to driver skill, timing and luck. And what would that prove? Note to GM: if you want to market your trucks in wholly unoriginal ways, leave reality out of it and just make an ad showing your truck kicking the other trucks asses or mocking owners of competing brands. You know, the way the good lord intended trucks to be marketed. These guys have it figured out.
Ford’s President of the Americas, Mark Fields tells Automotive News [sub] that production of its full sized SUV’s are being ramped up as demand has unexpectedly outstripped dwindling inventories. Due to sales of the Ford Expedition rising 45 percent in December and the Lincoln Navigator jumping 60 percent, Ford see this as a good opportunity to take advantage of this new customer confidence. Fields didn’t disclose details about the production bump, but given long term trends in full-sized sales and oil prices, we’re thinking it shouldn’t be too dramatic. (Read More…)
According to our data, the full-size pickup segment declined by 29.4 percent last year. Of all full-sized pickups, the Chevy Silverado lost the most volume, dropping 32 percent and an eye-popping 148,521 units compared to 2008. GMC Sierra dropped 33.6 percent, or about 56k units. Overall, GM shed half a million pickup sales last year, as its total truck sales fell to 1.2 million. When you’re losing that kind of volume in a shrinking segment, you know it’s time for a hold-em-or-fold-em moment. According to the Detroit News, GM is doubling down on its full-sized truck ambitions, allocating “several hundred million” of your tax dollars towards a re-working of the GMT 900-based trucks.
About a year ago, Nissan’s response to nose-diving truck sales betrayed some serious ambivalence about chasing the profitable-yet-dangerous segment. Its first plan was to rebadge the new Ram, but that deal has fallen apart in the wake of Chrysler’s shotgun wedding to Fiat. At a loss for options, Nissan canceled the Quest, QX56 and Armada and started tooling up its Canton plant to produce commercial vehicles. It looked like Nissan’s days in the truck market were over. Now, USA Today reports that Nissan is developing a new full-sized pickup (and SUV) after all. By itself. Who’d have thunk it?
Pickuptrucks.com‘s Mike Levine snapped this shot of Honda’s NAIAS booth, indicating that the Motor Company might not be quite as proud of its unibody truck as it once was. Ridgeline sold 16,464 units last year, less than half of its 2008 volume. Honda’s Alabama plant, where the Ridgeline is assembled alongside the Pilot, saw its output drop 35 percent in 2009. Having tried the unibody option that so many formerly truck-dependent firms now see as an alternative to body-on-frame offerings, it seems doubtful that Honda would recommend it to any of them. When it comes to the truck market, there are no easy answers.
GM’s Australian Holden division has been developing the kind of big-bore RWD vehicles we tend to think of as being quintessentially American for quite some time. But every time GM hints at repatriating one of these old-school machines to its spiritual homeland in the states, something goes terribly wrong. One classic example of this disfunction was the offshoot of GM’s last effort to bring Holdens stateside as the Pontiac G8, the G8 Sport Truck, a rebadge of Holden’s Ute. The travails of the G8 have been well documented, but the Sport Truck was killed before it even had the chance to lose GM money and be cut along with the Pontiac brand. Now, just as the memory of that savage tease was fading, GM’s Mark Reuss reveals that the El Camino could be back after all.
Normally TTAC shies away from going too crazy with daily themes, but today we’ve got such a backlog of truck-related news and analysis we’re going to go ahead and dub today Truck Thursday. After all, few automakers have invested much in trucks and SUVs since gas prices began rising in 2008, and now the segment stands at a crossroads. Firms like Toyota, which invested too much too late in the truck and SUV market have to figure out how to manage its overcapacity. Firms like GM and Chrysler, which got bad reps for becoming overdependent on trucks and utes are faced with the challenge of keeping much-needed profits flowing while weaning themselves off their body-on-frame addictions. New challengers like Mahindra are headed into the market with a utilitarian ethos that’s been missing from the segment for decades, and established players are responding. Old brands like HUMMER are dying on the vine. The result is a truck market that’s rife with change and transition. Join us as we delve into this changing world of trucks and SUVs today, during TTAC’s celebration of Truck Thursday.
Not long ago we wondered what the hell Mahindra was up to, as the Indian firm had delayed its US launch seemingly indefinitely. Thanks to Pickuptrucks.com, we’ve learned that Mahindra still has yet to file paperwork for federal standards compliance, and that the launch date for its diesel Pickup has been pushed back to the nebulous date of “middle spring 2010.” Federal testing is complete, but Mahindra won’t submit compliance paperwork to the feds until January. The company reckons this bureaucratic hurdle will be complete by February, clearing the way for a product launch sometime around April. According to pickuptrucks.com, Mahindra will be offering two-door and four-door versions of its pickup at launch, both powered by a 2.2 liter diesel engine. Mahindra intends for its trucks to achieve 30 mpgs and 1.3 ton hauling capacity.
The Argentinian-produced Volkswagen Amarok pickup might be coming to the US if VW thinks it can sell enough of them. VW of America’s Stephan Jacoby tells pickuptrucks.com “we’d have to sell at least 100,000 Amarok pickups to make it feasible.” But don’t get too excited: the only compact pickup to sell in those numbers is the Toyota Tacoma, which sold 102,327 units year-to-date. (Read More…)
We noted earlier that Chrysler’s turnaround is dependent on Ram and other truck-based models to maintain the steady profit increases projected in its five-year plans. CEO Sergio Marchionne confirmed the importance of body-on-frame vehicles to Chrysler’s US lineup in a recent interview with Automotive News [sub]. “I think it will be very stupid for us to assume the same type of European style and sizing which has driven the automobile portfolio of Fiat Group will prevail in the U.S.” Marchionne tells AN’s Luca Ciferri. Marchionne says Chrysler’s US lineup of full-sized pickups, SUVs, large cars and minivans will see their fuel efficiency improve to keep up with pressures on the market, but that the US linup will not suddenly downsize or work away from its traditional strengths. Marchionne even aknowledged that the Ram brand would continue to be a crucial profit center, just as Fiat Professional-branded commercial vehicles drive much of Fiat’s profit in Europe. But as another report in Automotive News [sub] explains, the truck market is continuing to erode underfoot. Chevrolet truck marketing executive John Schwegman explains that
in 2005, buyers who chose pickups “primarily for image” accounted for 200,000 to 250,000 annual sales. That fell to about 100,000 in 2008. This year, he says, only about 50,000 personal-use buyers will drive home full-sized pickups.
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