The Truck Brand War Score: How GMC Won June 2015

GMC is the unexpected hero of truck sales for June 2015, taking GM way past Ford on pickups and enormous American SUV sales. Meanwhile the Chevy Colorado is still fighting an uphill battle against the Toyota Tacoma in smaller trucks.

We used to report monthly pickup truck sales with charts and graphs and nobody seemed interested. But part of me feels like this information is worth sharing... so we’re trying a more abstract approach. Let me know what you think!

The Honda Ridgeline

The Honda Ridgeline gets its own category because there’s no more Subaru Brat or Dodge Rampage or, what’s that other one? Oh yeah; Chevy El Camino, anymore. This will also be the last time it gets its own category until the new one comes out because Honda sold seven last month.

Analysis: The next Ridgeline will be more of a legitimate mid-size competitor on capability. Honda only needs to stand out on economy to have a winner.

Mid-Sized Trucks

Chevy is very proud to report that their Colorados are selling quickly, staying on lots for “just 15 days” before somebody takes ‘em home. But even when combined with the twin GMC Canyon’s sales numbers, GM’s mid-size effort is still way behind the Toyota Tacoma.

Colorado did officially leave the Nissan Frontier in the dust, though. So it’s got that going for it. Which is nice. I still think the Frontier is a great little truck, that you can have with four-wheel drive, six-cylinders, and a five-speed manual by the way.

Analysis: Tacoma’s brand cachet is so strong that a competitor has be more than just better in an objective sense, which GM may have underestimated. That said, a 15 day turn is impressive... why would Chevy tolerate a production bottleneck if the Colorado’s selling so fast? Something seems off.

Full-Sized Trucks

Ford F-Series kept a small lead over Chevy, although GM’s combined efforts with the Silverado and GMC Sierra blew their doors off by about 15,000 sales. Then again, Ford’s transaction price went up, so they’re selling fewer trucks for more money. The people have spoken; they want luxotrucks and Ford’s got ‘em.

Ram sales lagged behind a lot last month, but of course it still did about three times the Toyota Tundra’s performance.

The Nissan Titan was happy just to hit quadruple-digits in June.

Analysis: Increased demand for high-end trucks is going to be a thing. Ford’s proving it, and Ram and Chevy’s people have told me they agree. This is where the market’s going, how do you feel about it?

Big American SUVs

At this point there are way too many SUVs to fit into a chart any sane person would want to read or analyze, so for now we’ll keep it old-school between Ford and Chevy. Er, and GMC and Cadillac.

Ford’s eager to report that the Expedition outsold the Suburban last month, but the short story is GM still dumps all over the blue oval in full-size SUV sales. More than twice as many Suburbans, Yukons and Escalades got sold against Ford’s Expedition and Navigator variants.

Correction: I thought the Yukon beat out its Chevy equivalent but that’s only because I forgot about the Tahoe! Still, GMC seems to make up a bigger chunk of GM’s SUV portfolio than I’d have thought.

Analysis: The Expedition and Navigator’s 3.5 EcoBoost has a better torque curve than GM’s 6.2 V8 and they generally undercut equivalent GMs on price, but they’re just not as nice inside. And that means a lot to these buyers.

Off-Roaders

Anyone care about how the few off-road oriented new vehicles sell in a given month? Genuinely asking here, because I’ll start writing it up regularly if you want to read about it.

With the Ford Raptor on hiatus, your options besides a few pickup variants are pretty much just Jeep Wrangler or Toyota 4Runner. And Jeep doesn’t just dominate this market; they sell twice as many Wranglers as Toyota sells 4Runners. Also about four times Nissan’s Xterra sales. (Oh yeah, the Xterra!)

Heck; there were pretty much as many Wranglers sold in June as all the vehicles in the “Big American SUV” category combined!

Also, there were seven FJ Cruisers and 158 Land Cruisers sold off Toyota lots in June 2015.

I’m excluding Land Rover here because it feels weird to compare them, or the Mercedes G-Wagen, to the Wrangler. Thoughts?

Analysis: Holy crap people love Wranglers. If there are so many being built, why the hell are they so hard to buy used?!

Andrew P. Collins is Jalopnik’s off-road and adventure guy. Shoot him an email at andrew@jalopnik.com or hit him up on Twitter @andr3wcollins to talk trucks.