Automotive Trucks information on net.

Pickup trucks are true American icons. Also, they have earned vast amounts of money for their manufacturers while providing for both the real and perceived needs of their buyers. Pickups are volume products, averaging for the past five years, 3.1 million sales in the United States. As job-providers for many tens of thousands of automotive industry workers, pickups carry a heavy economic load.

Unlike SUVs, pickups come in only two basic sizes, compact and large. For the past few years sales of the more aggressively marketed large units have pushed awareness of the compacts into the background. It has not always been so as illustrated in the accompanying table.

Large pickups hit a record 14.5 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales in 1978, a year of economic exuberance and little incursion by the compacts. That peak was quickly followed by an economic dip and growing sales of compacts, causing low shares for both the large and total pickup categories.

In 1978, large was good, but new domestic compacts were on the horizon and gasoline prices doubled through the early 1980s. By 1986, the large-pickup share of industry had been halved.

In 1986 and 1987, compacts, pushed by new domestic models, high fuel costs, young buyers and faddishness, outsold the large variety. Quickly, in 1988, gasoline prices subsided, the youth market moved on, the fad quotient dissolved and America's big-is-better mode returned. In 1988, large pickups regained their ascendancy.

Following the 1988 crossover, compacts continued a general pattern of decline in both market share and volume. Concurrently, and more than offsetting the compact decline, sales of large pickups accelerated sharply through 1996, benefiting from relatively stable gasoline prices and decent economic growth while suffering only a moderate share loss from the relatively short-term fuel cost and economic activities. The 1997-2001 years brought only modest share gains to the large pickups.

Following the 1998 total-pickup peak of 19.1 percent of the combined car/truck industry, the total pickup market has declined as large pickups were unable to offset the again declining compacts, particularly in recent months as the large units began to lose share.

# posted by Medical Information : 2:05 AM