Welcome back! We return from our holiday break with a lot of news. Our biennial state of the industry report published Monday, with unique features on the dealer, independent aftermarket and supplier channels. We address the unexpected yet welcome explosion of Class 8 truck orders in December and International’s S13 integrated powertrain for EPA 2027 regulations. We touch on the upcoming Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week and our Distributor of the Year Award, as well as the ATD Truck Dealer of the Year program. We also feature guest commentary from MacKay & Company, Performance Brokerage Services and American Payments Group and our TPS top products countdown, which concluded last week.
Lucas: Hey everybody, Lucas here. Welcome back to the TPS Weekly News Roundup. We had a couple weeks off for the holidays. Christmas. New Year’s. Everything going on. I hope you had a great holiday season. I know we had a great holiday season in this house, but I hope you’re also like me excited to kind of get back into the swing of things and start talking about what’s happening in the dealer market and the aftermarket channels. A lot of news this week, a lot of things to run down, let’s go ahead and get started.
A big thing for us this week is we released our biennial state of the industry survey and state of the industry report. this comes out every other year and we look at what happened last year and what our expectations are for 2026. We had three articles come out this week. One on the aftermarket channel, one on the dealer channel one on the supplier sector. As I’m sure you can guess, aftermarket sentiment for 2025 and into 2026 is a little bit better. Dealers coming into 2026, really not in the best position, but hopeful for 2026, hopeful that this year’s going to be better. Suppliers, same situation. They’re really hopeful that 2026 is a turnaround. Lot of hope that some of the uncertainty and a lot of the challenges we saw in 2025 kind of start to alleviate, or fall to the wayside in 2026 and we can get back to regular business conditions.
Those three stories are out now. You also should be able to get access to the survey we did of our audience that should be available on the website any day now. Check that out. Make sure to get all those stories. Really great content there.
On the topic of 2026, we ended 2025 with the best truck orders we’ve seen in years: 42,000 units in December. That was up 108% from November, that was up about 15 to 20% year over year. So, really good sign for truck orders in December. Is that the start of a sudden order broom or just a single month of companies finally deciding, ‘Look, we’ve got to place some orders. We have a better understanding of EPA [regulations].’ I think we’ll know more in January. I think it’s probably more likely that it was just some pent-up demand. It’s not going to be the start of a huge explosion in orders, but still good to see. I mean, we’ll take a positive month of orders no matter what causes it. So great that that happened.
Some other stuff this week. International announced its S13 integrated Powertrain on Wednesday for EPA 2027 regulations.
A couple of interesting features there. International’s really, really proud of its integrated powertrain. It’s a very simple design. They’ve pulled a lot of complexity out of their powertrain and they’re really excited to bring this 2027 version to market because their believe is it’s almost identical — or I shouldn’t say almost identical — but there are very few changes from what they’re putting into trucks today, what they’ve produced from 2022 to 2026. About 90% of the components are the same. Similar expectations for parts, for service, for maintenance, for drivability. The engine is going be very similar. Also a couple things it doesn’t have: It doesn’t have an EGR cooler; it’s not going to have a 48-volt grid heater, which some of the other OEMs are going to have to do to meet EPA 2027 regulations for NOx. So, International, really excited about that powertrain. If you’re an International dealer or you’re somebody who’s servicing International engines, make sure you check that story out.
HDAW is in a little bit more than a week. We started our HDAW previews this week. If you didn’t see that first story, check that out. We’ve been profiling our Distributor of the Year finalists over the last four weeks. The fifth profile will come out next week. Our Distributor of the Year award will be presented Tuesday, [Jan.] 19, at HDAW. If you haven’t kept up on that award program, please do so.
Next week we’ll start profiling the ATD Truck Dealer of the Year nominees for that award presentation in February.
We [also] had some great columns this week. One from Performance Brokerage Services in their monthly series. We had one American Payments Group on credit card fees and credit card processing. We had a report from MacKay & Company on alternative power. So that story is out on the site.
And then if you didn’t see it a couple weeks ago, we did announce the top product on our 2025 TPS top products countdown. It was a hand tool from Milwaukee Tool for the shop. So, if you didn’t see that story, check that out.
But hopefully you saw the state of the industry stuff. You saw the truck orders, you saw the International news, you saw the big news this week. If you didn’t go to the website, sign up for the newsletter. Be sure to like and subscribe these videos so you can get them every week. I know this one was longer. Next week will be shorter. We’re glad to be back.
We hope you have a great rest of your week. We have great weekend and we’re excited for 2026. So everybody have a great weekend. Thank you. Bye.
