America wants to keep on truckin’

“I want my truck back” — that’s what the vehicle buyers are telling the dealerships.

Toyota’s US sales chief predicted in late 2015 that the RAV4 would outsell Camry within five years. It won’t take nearly that long.

Family sedans like Toyota’s Camry — the top-selling US car the past 15 years — will be surpassed for the first time by a trio of compact sport utility vehicles: the Nissan Rogue, Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V.

The faster-than-anticipated rise of crossovers reflects a sweeping shift in American consumer taste and rushed efforts by manufacturers to rework their factories at the whims of car shoppers.

“It’s so hard to forecast small SUVs,” Bob Carter, another Toyota sales executive, said this month. “We forecast for growth, then it blows through the forecast and goes further.”

Until Hurricane Harvey hit, some analysts expected strong demand for these models to pace the industry’s first monthly sales gain this year in August.

After Harvey slammed Houston — one of the largest vehicle markets in the country — Kelley Blue Book trimmed its August sales projections released before the hurricane made landfall.

Prior to the storm analysts predicted the annualized selling rate, adjusted for seasonal trends, may drop to 16.4 million before the storm, from 17.2 million a year earlier.

Demand for vehicles to replace those damaged by flooding may boost auto demand starting as soon as September and continuing into next year.

Through July, the Rogue was the top-selling vehicle in the US after those full-size pickups, with deliveries surging 25 percent. Toyota’s RAV4, up 15 percent, is only about 1,500 units behind.

The seismic rearrangement of the sales rankings that’s seen SUVs overtake sedans has been bubbling up for a while, said John Mendel, Honda’s former top US sales executive.

“It’s like watching kids grow,” Mendel, who retired in April, said by phone. “You watch them every day and you don’t really notice so much. Then all the sudden you look back from two years ago, like, ‘Holy crap! When did that happen?’ ”