Continued healthy activity for heavy vocational trucks since September’s order explosion suggests some level of prebuying has begun on top of strong end market demand as work truck buyers look to get ahead of the EPA’s 2027 Clean Truck regulation and 2028’s ZEV-targeting GHG-3 regulation, according to new information from ACT Research. While we include GHG-3, we expect rulemaking will ultimately find its way to the dustbin or otherwise be heavily rewritten, as published in the latest release of the North American Commercial Vehicle OUTLOOK.

“Amid healthy demand, strong build, and already high inventories, the industry’s capacity to sell finished products to end users could well be the limiting factor for production in 2025,” according to Kenny Vieth, ACT’s President and Senior Analyst.

He added, “With tractor demand strength more suspect in early 2025, vocational truck production should continue at high levels at the start of the year. Vocational build per day rose to a level not seen since 2006, at 513 units per day in November, and blew past that level, to 537 units per day, in December.”

“Importantly, we note the vocational market’s chokepoint has not been capacity-constrained OEM components, but body-builder capacity constraints. While improving, retail sales rates continue to lag build rates, resulting in inventory accumulation throughout last year. Compared to a nearly 120k annualized build rate in recent months, the retail sales rate continued to rise into the end of 2024, averaging a 111k annualized rate in Q4,” Vieth concluded.