Ford Truck and SUV Sales Stay Hot
Consumers continue to clamor for well-optioned Ford trucks and SUVs, driving average transaction prices sky high.
Ford’s overall sales continue to slip in 2017, but that slowdown has nothing to do with its truck or SUV numbers. The automaker closed out the month of June by selling 229,979 vehicles, a 5.1 percent decline over last year. That loss can be attributed to a 23% decline in car sales and a 13.9% decrease in fleet sales. Meanwhile, F-Series and SUV sales continued to reach new heights.
Ford sold 97,536 F-Series pickups, a 9.8% increase, to post its best June performance since 2001. A whopping 55% of those sales went to high end Super Duty pickups. Meanwhile, the Raptor helped the automaker achieve a $3,100 gain in transaction pricing, which is double the segment average. For the year, Ford has sold a total of 429,860 trucks, which represents a healthy 8.8% increase over last year.
”King Ranch, Lariat, Platinum, really high demand for high series super duties, with a lot of our class exclusive features that customers are demanding,” Ford Sales Analyst Erich Merkle told investors in a conference call. “So that drove our transaction prices, in addition to that you’ve got the Raptor out there now for F-150, which is also added to that mix.”
The real winner in June, however, was Ford’s SUV lineup. The Blue Oval sold a total of 77,712 ‘utes in June, which represents a 3.2% increase. The Explorer proved a major driver of that success, enjoying its best June in over a decade. Buyers scooped up 21,304 Explorers last month – 22.7% more than last year. That performance also helped the company achieve an important milestone in the first half of 2017.
“So this marks Explorer’s best June performance in 12 years with sales up 18 percent in the nation’s largest SUV market: the Northeast,” Merkle told investors. “Now what Explorer does, it also caps off a record first-half for Ford brand SUVs. Ford brand SUVs in the first half were up 3 percent with 406,464 SUVs sold. That’s the first time that we’ve sold over the 400 thousand mark Ford brand SUVs at any time in Ford’s history.”
