Outlook on State of Trucking Industry in 2018

While the public clings to its image of trucking as a low-tech, conservative industry populated by cowboy drivers and speeding big trucks belching black smoke, the reality is truck users and the companies that build them are undergoing a rapid transformation based on advanced technologies, environmental concerns, big data and massive demographic and social changes.

Businesses that use trucks and those that supply them are entering a decade of change that will outpace anything they’ve experienced in the last 100 years.

The “2018 Commercial Vehicle Report: Outlook on the Trucking Industry,” a new report from Wards Intelligence, offers an in-depth look at the forces that have shaped the current trucking industry and analyzes how those forces will drive its anticipated rapid transformation.

The report includes a detailed description of the U.S. commercial-vehicle population, explains the important differences between truck classifications, outlines how each is used in a broad variety of applications by different industries and forecasts the market for 2018.

While truck sales in the U.S. always have been highly cyclical, the report analyzes those cycles over the past 10 years to explain how the industry has entered a new pattern of sales cycles, as well as how market shares have shifted over that period. The impacts of regulation, technology, demographics and ecommerce are all explored in depth to help explain those changes and to set the stage for a meaningful look at the next 10 years in trucking and truck manufacturing.

The 10-year outlook individually identifies and details the disruptive changes coming to truck equipment and any business employing trucks. It maps how autonomous technology will move into various CV applications, as well as analyzes how specific alternative fuels such as natural gas and hydrogen will penetrate various types of trucking activities.

New sources of truck-related data and shifts in logistics being made to more effectively address last-mile delivery cost pressures also are explored for their impacts on both CV equipment and fleet operations.

Turning to the future of truck manufacturing, the new report provides a multifaceted perspective on the move to vertical integration among the major OEMs. Going beyond new relationships with suppliers, it looks at how vertical integration already is beginning to transform every aspect of the industry from how dealerships operate to how fleets will acquire and dispose of their trucks.

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