ATD offers bleak 2026 sales forecast based on 2025 data; Eaton’s impending exit from trucking and how to have an AI success story

Lucas: Hey everybody. Lucas here for today’s TPS Weekly News Roundup.

I’m going to start with the ATD Truck Beat report, which came out late last week and had the final data for 2025 truck sales. The Class 8 truck market, about 208,000 units last year. The Classes 4 through 7 market about 208,000 units last year. So 416,000 overall, that’s down 13.6% from 2024. Medium-duty was down 13.9%. Heavy-duty down 13.3%. There were some wins in there for some individual brands. Mack picked up market share in the medium- and heavy-duty space. Western [Star] picked up a little bit of market share in the heavy-duty space. Ford had a really good year in the medium-duty space but, generally speaking, a tough year for commercial truck dealers.

And the expectation for 2026, as I’m sure you all are aware, is things are not going to be any better — or they’re unlikely to be better. Medium-duty is expected to be fairly flat, maybe a little bit of an increase according to ATD, but heavy-duty is expected, ATD is estimating about 171,000 units sold, which would be down 18%. Hopefully that’s not the case. Hopefully we get some improvement in freight rates and the market turns around, but we’re currently looking at 2026 being very similar, if not worse than 2025 from a sales perspective.

You could see that in some of the earnings reports. We got some data from Daimler and International last week. Paccar released their earnings this week. Another positive profit year for Paccar, their 87^th in a row, but they were down in sales. They were down in revenue. You can see that on the website.

Eaton announcing this week they would like to separate and spin off their mobility business, which is their truck business, their transmissions, their parts and components. Eaton wants to focus on their electrical business and their aerospace business as really their core, so they intend to spin off the mobility business by Q1 of 2027. We’ve reached out to Eaton for more information. We’ll have an additional story as soon as we hear back from them on exactly what this means and what this means for your business.

Also we had a story on AI. As I mentioned last week, the keynote speaker at [HDAW] Noelle Russell, a longtime Amazon programmer who worked on Amazon’s Alexa, she spoke about AI and how AI can work in your business and how it cannot work in your business. Also there was  a consulting firm, BCG, which gave some data on a survey they’ve done with MEMA members during Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue last week. So, we had a story based on those two presentations, some interesting takeaways there.

70% of suppliers are currently working on in integrating AI or have actively integrated AI into their operations right now. but only 14% claim that they’re really getting valuable delivery and resources from the tool. That’s not surprising. Noelle Russell saying 95% of AI pilot programs fail. The reason being people kind of bite off more than they can chew. They think AI can do more than it actually can, or they try to put it in places where it’s not entirely ready. So, if you want to use AI, you want to make it productive, you want to make it successful for your business, check out that story and understand some of the pitfalls in implementing AI.

Next week we’ll be at the ATD Show in Las Vegas, so be sure to check out the website there. We’ll have some more news. We’ll have a lot more from earnings and other information in the industry. Be sure to check out the newsletter, check out the website, catch up on everything you missed this week. Be sure to like and subscribe these videos.

We hope you have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Thanks everybody. Bye.