Bragging Rights, Chrysler vs. Ford: Even Texas Ain't Big Enough For Two Official Pickups
Yee-haw! The big-pickup market is finally worth fighting over again.
Witness a bit of a public relations piling-on, in which both Chrysler and Ford (F) are busy promoting the fact that they won quote-unquote "official" Truck of Texas awards from the Texas Auto Writers Association.
General Motors is conspicuous by its absence. It's been a while, since 2001 in fact, since GM had an official Truck of Texas, according to the TAWA web site. It's been even longer for Toyota (TM), since it had a winner in 2000. Toyota has gone out of its way to cultivate the Texas truck market, including locating the U.S. factory that builds the Toyota Tundra in Texas.
The Texas awards are worth fighting over, because sales of big pickups are back. Memories of $4-per-gallon gasoline have already faded from the summer of 2008. As luck would have it, Ford and Chrysler both launched new full-sized pickups right on the heels of record gas prices.
They've been scrambling ever since, but things are finally looking up this year. Sales of large pickups were up 42 percent in September, according to AutoData. Year to date, large pickup sales were up about 19 percent. That's a bigger improvement than the U.S. market as a whole, which is up about 10 percent, including both cars and trucks.
Nobody expects trucks to come back to their peak in the mid-2000s, when trucks - meaning pickups, SUVs, crossovers and minivans -- accounted for more than 50 percent of U.S. auto sales year after year. But they've definitely bounced back from their recent lows. AutoData said truck sales were up 41 percent in September, and up 16 percent year to date.
Luckily, there are plenty of Texas Truck awards to go around. Chrysler says its Ram was named top pickup over the weekend, in the annual Texas Auto Writers Association Texas Truck Rodeo. The company says its Ram trucks were also named Full-Size Truck of Texas, Heavy-Duty Truck of Texas and Luxury Truck of Texas.
Not only that, the all-new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee was named SUV of Texas. The Jeep brand also won Mid-Size SUV of Texas and Full-Size SUV of Texas.
Not to be outdone, rival Ford says that the entire Ford Truck lineup was named Truck Line of Texas. Ford says that Texas represents 20 percent of its total U.S. truck sales. That puts some dollar signs behind all the posturing.
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Photo: Chrysler