A hybrid? Forget it, say rising number of pickup buyers.

Conclusion: From the potato plains of Idaho to the edges of the Barnett Shale gas reserves in Texas, American workers are still betting on their trucks. Here in Cartersville, Troy Cline, a grocery store clerk and freelance landscaper, has owned trucks forever and currently captains a faded 1986 Ford F-100. But the sight of a used Silverado brought him to a dealer lot this week for a potential upgrade.

“The economy is tough out here, but there’s still construction going on and people are still working,” he says. As for his own search for a new vehicle, he says, “Owning a truck is kind of a guy thing. It’s sitting up high, above the fray.”

Mr. Cline has plenty of company.

“I have several customers that I’m trying to find trucks for right now: a farmer, a realtor, and a local businessman,” says Keith Watkins, general manager at Heritage Chevrolet in Lugoff, S.C.. “They’re willing to start spending their money again, and that’s really exciting for us.”

And in Wichita Falls, Texas, Patterson Auto Group CEO Paul Tigrett notes a trend: Instead of trading in their trucks, many consumers have added a fuel-efficient car to their personal fleet. About 60 percent of his customers use their trucks for work, he estimates.

“If you’re a plumber or in the air conditioning business or whatever along those lines, you’re not going to show up at a job site in a Yugo,” says Mr. Tigrett. “You’ve got to have a truck.”

Role of incentives

Economists, however, caution against reading too much into the truck sale surge. For one, Detroit is practically paying customers to take bloated inventories off their hands, relieving pent-up demand.
What’s more, the fundamentals of the auto industry overall point to a continued slowdown in sales this year.

“Incentives and lower gas prices suggest that there’s still some life in the truck market, but it is still swimming against these overall national and global trends,” says Martin Zimmerman, Ford’s former chief economist and now a business professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Then there’s the crux for Detroit: How to balance investments in smaller, more-efficient cars against the American love affair with the big ride? In the past, Washington has been leery about imposing stricter fuel-efficiency standards on Detroit automakers and higher fuel taxes on drivers, lest they dampen enthusiasm for the high-profit truck series that has largely sustained US automakers.

But that conventional wisdom is likely to be challenged under President Obama, who has argued for tougher fuel-efficiency standards to reduce carbon emissions by 10 percent in 2020. Moreover, the Washington bailout raised the political and social stakes inherent in the survival of the Big 3.

The recent spike in truck sales is “a major reason why we have not tried to rely on gas prices to move cleaner, more-efficient vehicles into the fleet,” says Mr. Becker, in Washington. “[Automakers] work for us now, and they need to be much more concerned about the air we breathe and the atmosphere our children grow up in and the oil addiction that their vehicles promote. They now have a social responsibility that they failed to recognize before.”

But trying to use tougher federal or state emission standards to force Detroit to build vehicles that Americans ultimately may not want is likely to be counterproductive, says Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, Calif. Offsetting a higher gas tax with federal rebates for purchasing high-efficiency vehicles, he argues, would be far more likely to wean Americans from their love affair with big trucks.

Previous

1 | 2