Breaking News: Toyota's Tundra is Outselling the GMC Sierra Pickup?!

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It has already been reported that the sales of GM’s new GMC Sierra and Chevrolet Silverado pickups are not selling as well as the automaker had hoped. Recently GM also announced that production of their full-size pickups is going to be scaled back due to slow sales. Toyota’s full-size Tundra is also new this year and has had some issues as well, which are mainly due to engine quality issues and crash test results. Well now it looks like Toyota’s once ignored full-size pickup is the fourth best-selling full-size half-ton pickup in the US, narrowly squeezing out the GMC Sierra.

These findings took some number crunching and creative thinking for Mike Levine at pickuptruck.com to figure out.

Here’s the math:

-General Motors has reported 115,185 GMC Sierras sold in the U.S. since January 1, 2007, which includes both 2006 and 2007 models.
-The numbers that GM reports also includes sales of light and heavy duty versions of the pickup; sales numbers for the ‘Sierra Classic’, based on the old GMT800 truck platform; and the new 2007 Sierra built on the next-generation GMT900 frame.
-GM doesn’t provide a breakdown of sales per model, per model year.
-This is where it gets tricky, Levine estimated using production figures that the Sierra-1500 pickup accounts for about 66 percent of the total trucks produced (using data from the last two years). Therefore out of the 115,185 pickups that GM reportedly sold so far this year about 76,600 of them were the Sierra-1500.
-Toyota has sold 105,990 Tundra pickups this year and out of that total 97,290 of them were the new 2007 model according to Toyota spokesperson Bill Kwong. (All were light-duty pickups since Toyota doesn’t have an HD Tundra yet)

So comparing apples to apples (Tundra vs Sierra 1500) it looks like Toyota has accomplished something that no other foreign automaker has managed to do. The Toyota Tundra is now the number four best selling half-ton pickup in the US, behind Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge. GMC still has the number four spot if you add up the total for half-ton and HD Sierra pickups, but that could change by the end of the year, if the trend continues.

Full Story: PickupTruck.com

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