We talk dealers on this week’s roundup — specifically Successful Dealers and Trailblazers. We discuss our recently completed Successful Dealer Award Summit, in which we discussed the market with our attendees and then crowned Rush Truck Centers as our 2026 Successful Dealer Award winner. We also tease our Trailblazer Award program, which will crown its fourth annual winner next week at the NTDA Convention. We cover September truck orders and what the softer open totals mean for dealer operations in Q4, as well as A-Rod heading to VIPAR and great data from RigDig on the growing U.S. truck fleet.
Hey, everyone. Lucas here for today’s TPS weekly news roundup. We’ve had a crazy busy week at TPS. We’ve been on the road with our Successful Dealer Award, and that’s where I’m going to get started today.
Monday and Tuesday was our Successful Dealer Award Summit in Nashville. We had a wonderful event. Five great dealers nominated for this year’s award: California Truck Centers, Excel Truck Group, Kenworth of Pennsylvania, Kenworth Sales Company and Rush Truck Centers. We welcomed leaders from all five of those businesses as, as well as several of our prior winners and obviously our gracious sponsors for an award summit. Monday we had a great reception. Tuesday, we really talked business, we talked the industry, we talked the trucking economy all morning. And then we awarded our 2026 Successful Dealer Award winner that evening. If you didn’t see the story, our winner was Rush Truck Centers. You can check that story out on the website. There’s also a video of Rush Chairman, CEO and President Rusty Rush accepting the award. You can see what Rusty said about winning. You can read about all the other finalists and all their great businesses. As I said Tuesday evening, all five companies incredibly deserving. All five could have won the Successful Dealer Award. A great program this year. We’re really proud of it and we hope you get the chance to read those stories.
Some other stuff this week. On Tuesday, I released our Mapping the Market report, which is our U.S. fleet demographics and population report based on data from RigDig, which is a product from Fusable, which is TPS’ parent company. Some great news in Q3 in the U.S. truck fleet. We added about 10,000 [carrier] prospects. That’s the first time that’s happened in about a year.
We added 147,000 verified vehicles, which are trucks that we can prove over the last 24 months have been active on the roadway. We also added about 82,000 trailers. Almost the entirety of the United States up from a prospect perspective, vehicle perspective and trailer perspective if you go state-to-state. So just really, really strong Q3 for the U.S. trucking fleet. Really great stuff there. You can check that story out. We call out a couple states, Louisiana, Ohio that had exceptionally strong Q3s, but really the entire country did well. So check that story out for some more detailed statistics about the U.S. truck fleet.
Also September truck orders were released late last week. We had the story Monday. We might have had it last weekend, but we definitely had the story Monday. ACT Research saying about 19,000 units was their preliminary expectation for September. FTR a little bit higher, around 21,000 units. The expectation from the data firms is still a lot of uncertainty around EPA 2027 NOx rule. We do have the update from July. We do know what the EPA says they’re probably going to do, but until that rule is finalized, there is some concern from the carrier base of ‘How certain am I going to be about the costs associated with these new pieces of equipment?’ Also, I think carriers and OEMs are still trying to decide, do we go with the 2027 compliant engine? Do we go with a 2026 engine, and pay the nonconformance penalties (NCP)? So, still some, some uncertainty in the truck market. Things haven’t bottomed out. Demand is still strong, but there is still some caution from carriers to decide, ‘do I want to invest or not?’ Check that story out.
Couple other quick things. The VIPAR Heavy Duty Conference is coming in two weeks. VIPAR announced this week Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod will be their keynote speaker so if you’re going to be there, make sure you check that out. I’m sure A-Rod will be pretty exciting and engaging.
Next week is the National Trailer Dealer Association (NTDA) Convention. We will be there. Our Trailblazer Award will be announced on Friday evening. If you haven’t read about our Trailblazer finalists, all those stories are available on the website.
As always, everything covered today is available on the website. Be sure to check it all out. Be sure to like and subscribe to these videos so you get them every week. I’m sure next week when I do this, I’ll be doing it from NTDA, so it’ll probably be a different backdrop.
Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
