If there’s a main character of the American highway, it’s got to be the Ford F-150. The full-size pickup closed out 2025 with 801,525 sales, marking a 232,432-unit lead over the Chevy Silverado. According toYouGov, however, trucks only made up 12% of all vehicles owned by Americans last year, with SUVs taking a substantial segment lead at 41% of the market.
Not only that, the SUV segment is growing, while Cox Automotive reports a 2.5% year-over-year dip in June sales for pickups. We could be looking at a future where anything that isn’t an SUV becomes an outlier.
23% Sales Surge Shows How The $35,000 Price Gap Is Reshaping The Market
2026 Hyundai Venue front 3/4 angle in red while parkedHyundai
Running down some key points in America’s drive toward SUVs…
- Subcompact SUV sales are up by 23% in the first half of 2026.
- The average transaction price for a subcompact SUV is around $31,113.
- The average transaction price for a full-size pickup in 2026 is $65,954.
- Full-size pickup sales are down by 2.5% from June 2025 to June 2026.
- The Ford F-Series saw an 11% dip in sales last year, while the Chevy Silverado HD saw a 16.8% drop.
- 30% of truck owners say that their next vehicle may be an SUV, while only 45% say that they’ll buy another truck.
- 66% of SUV owners say that they’re going to stick to SUVs for their next purchase.
It’s not so hard to guess what’s happening here. The average price for a new vehicle is over $50,000, wages have stagnated, gas prices are up, and SUVs in the subcompact-to-mid-size range offer an affordable alternative to oversized pickups.
In fact, if we take fuel expenses out of the equation entirely, the market still tends to favor smaller vehicles these days. The Ford F-150 Lightning waslosing Ford $44,000 on every unit sold over the last few years, leading to its cancellation. The F-150 Lightning was the most popular vehicle in its segment, easily outselling the Tesla Cybertruck and the Silverado EV, but the steep $54,780 starting price ensures that electric pickups will remain a niche segment, at least until the Slate EV paves the way for cheaper battery-powered trucks.
Why Buick Is Losing Ground While Hyundai Gains
2024 – 2026 Chevrolet Trax 2nd Gen SUV – rear 3/4 angle in greenChevrolet
The 23% average gain looks impressive on paper – but zoom into individual models and you’ll find that the SUV boom is leaving some brands behind entirely.
By and large, the SUV segment has seen an uptick in year-over-year (YoY) sales. Zoom in a bit, and it’s a different story from model to model. The Chevy Trax, in particular, actually lost 8% in sales from June 2025 to June 2026. Buick has been having a particularly rough go of it, losing almost 10% in Q1 sales on the Buick Envista and a whopping 36% on the Buick Encore GX.
Buick has seen a 32% YoY sales slump overall, with many analysts pointing to tariffs as the reason for the downturn. The Encore GX and the Envista are both built in South Korea, but have had relatively small price bumps for American buyers, typically under $3,000 from trim to trim. Even so, Buick’s luxury-lite categorization situates SUVs like the $26,495 Envista above budget-friendly winners like the $22,150 Hyundai Venue, which saw a 21% improvement in sales from 2024 to 2025.
The Corolla Cross And Model Y Are Outpacing the Segment – Here’s Why
North America-spec 2027 Tesla Model Y L side viewTesla
The Toyota Corolla Cross has proven to be a big winner in 2026, moving 20% more units by the end of June than it did in 2025. In the electric segment, Tesla is claiming an incredible 84.5% H1 bump in sales for the Model Y, moving 155,000 units in the first six months of the year, to just 84,001 units last year. In other words, the brand seems to have bounced back from last year’s controversies just fine.
Generally speaking, across the board, you’re going to find that the SUVs that saw a downturn, like the Honda CR-V, saw a much milder downturn than the leading full-size pickups. The CR-V lost just 4.9% on YoY H1 sales in 2026, while Ford lost more than twice that many F-150 sales for Q2.
It’s Not All Bad News On The Full-Size Pickup Front
2026 Ram 1500 Rebel driving front 3/4Stellantis
Not everyone jumping ship from Ford and Chevy is running to Hyundai, Toyota, and Tesla. Some of them are sticking to full-size pickups but giving up on brands to which they may have once been quite loyal.
What we’re saying is that it’s been a very good year for Ram. The brand has reported sales of its signature pickup to have jumped by 14% for Q2 in 2026. The brand sold 41,582 units in June alone, to just 34,478 units in June of 2025, and has outsold itself every month this year except for May, when it still managed to move 39,983 units to last May’s 43,507 sales.
That Hemi Engine Is Doing A Lot Of Heavy Lifting
Close-up of the 2026 Ram 1500 Big Horn Hemi badgeRam
Ram saw a 27% surge in Q1 alone this year, and, while the company does not provide exact sales breakdowns by engine, we’re betting that this has a lot to do with the return of the Hemi V8 as an option. Consider the fact that the Ram Pickup saw a major sales drop of 18.62% in 2024, which would be around the time the 2024 and 2025 models were selling with no Hemi option. Then, Ram brings the Hemi back into the mix, and sales suddenly jump by 27% for the first three months of the year.
There’s more going on than just the availability of the Hemi, of course. It’s a solid engine: a 5.7-liter naturally aspirated V8 producing 395 horsepower and 410 pound-feet of torque. But it’s not just that it’s a solid engine. The engine’s return is proof that Ram listens to its buyers. Nobody wanted to see the Hemi go, so Ram admitted it made a mistake, and brought it back.
The most affordable Hemi-equipped model comes in at $44,757 before taxes, financing, and so on. That’s not exactly cheap, but it’s considerably less expensive than the typical $65,954 transaction price for a full-size pickup.
Another way to look at this would be to argue that Ram only won back some of the customers it lost. The brand only managed to stem the bleeding in 2025, ending the year on a 1.14% YoY drop in sales, before bouncing back in early 2026. It remains to be seen whether year-end sales will make up for what has been a near-freefall for the brand from 2022-2025.
Bringing the Hemi back was a step in the right direction, but Ram might not be such an outlier when you look at the big picture. In other words, the whole full-size pickup segment looks to be on a moderate downturn, while Ram’s attempts at damage-control have helped to keep the brand relevant. How you interpret these numbers may come down to whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty type.
Toyota’s Sales Numbers Prove There’s More At Play Than Just Price
2026 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro WaveMaker Blue front 3/4 angle while drivingToyota
Price is likely the biggest deciding factor in SUVs seeing an uptick this year, while full-size trucks see a downtick. But it’s not the only factor at play.
Consider that Toyota Tundra sales have been cooling off over the last couple of years. The Tundra saw a 27.4% spike in sales for 2024, only to lose 7.5% in year-end sales in 2025, and a further 0.8% downturn in H1 2026. A new Tundra starts at $41,260.
Meanwhile, a Toyota Sequoia running on the same twin-turbo V6 engine starts at $65,725. The Sequoia has seen a 13% increase in sales for the first half of 2026, despite its higher price.
Our hypothesis? Check in with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hiring for construction work has essentially flatlined leading into 2026. When construction slows, so, too, will truck sales. When you’re losing daily drivers because full-size trucks are becoming too expensive to buy and too expensive to refuel, and you’re losing the labor force because hiring has stagnated, who do you have left to sell to?
Sources:Cox Automotive,YouGov,Yahoo,GM Authority,Bureau of Labor Statistics.
