THE BIG-TICKET PICKUPS,
NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS WILL YOU GUESS WHO IS THE FASTEST GROWING PLAYER IN LUXURY SEGMENT
Here’s a skill-testing question: What is the fastest growing brand in the luxury segment? Actually, to weed out all those “entry-level” pretenders to luxury status that once-grand marques are peddling to penny-pinching millennials, let me be a little more specific and make the question: What is the fastest growing brand selling luxury vehicles with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of more than $60,000?
Did you guess Mercedes-Benz? You wouldn’t be alone, but despite a lineup of big-buck SUVs and sedans, according to a New York Times report, Mercedes has seen its share of the US$60,000-plus market in the United States drop by some 25 per cent.
How about Porsche? With Cayennes now the preferred minivan of suburban hausfraus, it has to be Porsche, right? Alas, Stuttgart’s share of America’s uber-luxury market is down from about 13 per cent to less than eight. BMW? Ditto. Lexus? Even worse.
No, the fastest-growing purveyor of hedonistic boudoirs-onwheels is … GMC.
Yes, according to the Edmunds. com data that The Times collated, General Motors’ GMC division — whose “professional grade” tagline is supposedly targeted at blue-collar plumbers and construction foremen — is, by quite some margin in fact, North America’s fastest-growing luxury brand.
Now, we’ve all grown accustomed to the news of trucks dominating North American automotive sales. Anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of us — depending on where you live and what you’re counting as a truck — are now shunning traditional passenger cars. But there’s been very little talk of how trucks — most specifically, domestic trucks — have literally taken over luxury sales.
According to Edmunds’ numbers, GMC — which, I will remind you, sells only pickups and SUVs — accounted for 11.3 per cent of all vehicles over US$60,000 sold in the U.S. That is up from 0.1 per cent in 2012. Making this largely unreported transition in the luxury industry even more dramatic is that both Ford and Chevrolet are clustered at the top of the luxury heap, all three capturing more than 10 per cent of the U.S. $60,000-plus market, thanks to the public’s thirst for leather-clad pickups. According to the data, Ford, GM and Fiat Chrysler Autombiles now have roughly 40 per cent of the US$60,000-plus market, almost entirely on the back of truck and SUV sales.
Nor should this transition be relegated to the U.S. Here in the Great White North, domestic automakers have sold close to one million full-size pickups in the past three years. Even in pennypinching Quebec, where subcompacts rule the roost, Ford’s F-150 is now the sales king, with 25,000 or so units finding a home in La Belle Province.
Nor are Canadians being more Scrooge-like than their American counterparts when it comes to truck purchases. GMC sold 61,883 Sierras in Canada last year and, according to The General, 40 per cent of those cost more than $60,000. Now, never mind that 60,000 Canadian loonies aren’t quite the luxury demarcation that 60,000 American greenbacks are, that still means GMC sold about 25,000 Sierras that cost more than a very well-equipped C-Class Benz. And that number is just for pickups and doesn’t include the Yukon or Yukon XL Denali SUVs, which start at $79,850. Nor does it include the 9,000 or so Chevy Silverados that GM Canada says it sold in 2017 with a transaction price of more than 60-large.
For a bit more context, consider this: GM sold more $60,000-plus Sierras — again, just pickups — than Mercedes-Benz and BMW did S-, CL-, E-, CLS-, GLE-, GLS-, G-, SL- and SLC-Class models and 5-, 6- and 7-Series as well as X5s, X6s and Z4s, respectively, which is pretty much every Mercedes and BMW sold in Canada with a base MSRP of $60,000-plus. Throw those 9,000 Chevy Silverados into the mix and GM’s pickups outsold all Audi, BMW and MercedesBenz models over 60-large.
Now, to be fair to the German luxury marques, I didn’t include models that could be optioned over $60,000 (the 3 and 4 Series, for instance, various C-Classes and some iterations of the A5 and Q5). But then, neither did I include the various Ford F-150 models that retail for more than $60,000, of which there are five: King Ranch, Platinum, Limited and two versions of the Raptor. Nor FCA’s Ram, which has eight trim levels that exceed $60,000. Nor does this include the Yukon, Tahoe, Suburban, Expedition, Navigator and Jeep SUVs in that price range. The point of The New York Times article was that customers are trading in their BMW 550s and Audi A6s on Fords and GMCs.
Besides, arguing over whether a GMC Sierra is as luxurious as a Mercedes, or a Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk edition is as sporty as a BMW X5M is to miss the incredible transition that is occurring in the luxury segment.
The headlines of mainstream media say German automakers are taking over the North American luxury segment, at the expense of the domestics. At first glance, the figures would seem to back that: Mercedes-Benz Canada sold 51,390 vehicles last year, which dwarfs the 13,330 units Cadillac moved. BMW and Audi each sold more than 35,000 cars and SUVs, roughly four times the number that Lincoln moved. But while the German automakers’ growth is largely focused on lower-priced models — the X1s, Q3s and GLAs millennials are buying like hotcakes — the domestics have quietly taken over the $60,000-plus segment. These big-ticket pickups are also hugely profitable, their engineering and tooling subsidized by the countless less-expensive models based on the same platform.
The fact is, the U.S. builds the most successful luxury vehicles in North America. Even if they are trucks.