When gas prices approached and then topped the $4 mark earlier this year, truck and SUV buyers headed for the hills – presumably to never be seen again. But a funny thing happened between June and August, and it might have been just enough to lure potential truck buyers out of the holes they were hiding in: Gas prices tumbled by about 40 cents.
Believe it or not, the best-selling car in August wasn’t a four-cylinder economy car. And it wasn’t even from Toyota or Honda . It was the Chevrolet Silverado with 55,765 sales.
“With the recent moderation of fuel prices, we’re seeing some relaxation of pent-up demand in pickups and utilities,” Mark LaNeve, vice president of GM North America sales, service and marketing, told Automotive News. Pickup truck sales rebounded better than their SUV counterparts, likely because of their main commercial, rather than personal, uses.
Despite the moderate August success, the truck market is still a far cry from what it used to be. In fact, August sales were down more than 17 percent from the same month a year earlier.
GM knows that the better-than-expected results aren’t an indication that the truck market will “snap back”, as LeNeve put it, but it’s a bit of good news for the Detroit automaker. Trucks have traditionally been GM’s biggest money makers and, even with the employee pricing event, August’s sales will help to put a little extra coin in the automaker’s pockets when it needs it the most.
It remains to be seen if full-size vehicles sales have truly bottomed out, but if gas prices can remain relatively flat, trucks and SUVs could see a slight rebound, although they will probably never get back to their historical highs ever again.
