Michael Accardi 
The headline may indicate General Motors (ahem, general motors) took the full-size pickup truck sales crown away from Ford, but that would be slightly misleading. The Ford F-Series family still outsold every other full-size truck nameplate out there by a hefty margin with 787,422 trucks sold, largely made up of the Ford F-150. That’s pretty much par for the course over the last few years, but if you combine the 594,094 Chevrolet Silverado sales and the 253,016 GMC Sierra pickup trucks moved, you end up with 847,110 GM-badged trucks that found new homes.
For a long time, this wasn’t really news, even though the Ford F-150 was the top-selling model in its class, General Motors as a corporate entity was pretty consistent at capturing the most total volume in the segment. 2020 saw Ford incur a double whammy of misfortune, the COVID-19 pandemic caused production interruptions during the early part of the year, then the generational changeover between the outgoing model and the new-for-2021 truck caused fewer trucks to be produced than in 2019. By the numbers, 2020 saw the F-Series lose more than 12% of its total volume in total pickup truck sales, which would have accounted for an extra 110,000 trucks.
Despite the pandemic, sales of the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 remained flat, while the heavy- and medium-duty variants of the Chevrolet Silverado enjoyed a year-over-year increase which helped the Chevy truck family slightly outperform its 2019 performance.
Ram ended up a close third-place with 563,676 trucks sold in 2020, which is a step back from 2019 when it managed to topple the Silverado for second on the leaderboard. Rounding out the fill size segment, the Toyota Tundra arrived behind the GMC Sierra in fifth place with 109,203 sales, while the Nissan Titan finished a distant last with just 26,439 trucks sold.
Now that production of the 2021 Ford F-150 is fully up to speed, it’s reasonable to expect the full-size volume crown to make it’s way back to Dearborn in 2021. Especially if you consider the new F-150 is offering six powertrains, including a diesel and a hybrid, along with a widely anticipated all-electric F-150 model.
We’ll have a full breakdown of 2020 pickup truck sales soon, so be sure to check back with MC&T regularly for more.
