Ford estimates it sold at least 640,000 F-Series pickup trucks in 2022 in the USA, which means it will once again be crowned as America’s top-selling vehicle.
The company says that it sold an average of one F-Series truck every 49 seconds last year.
The F-Series range includes the volume-selling F-150, including the all-electric Lightning variant, as well as the substantially beefier Super Duty models, which span from the F-250 to the F-600.
This marks the 46th straight year the F-Series has been the best selling pickup in the USA. The F-Series has also been America’s best selling vehicle for 41 years.
F-350 Super Duty
These records and numbers are impressive, so let’s take a deeper dive.
Although the F-Series range has retained its crown for another year, it is far from its peak. Back in 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic hit, Ford managed to sell roughly 900,000 F-Series models each year.
This fell to 787,422 in 2020, and 726,004 in 2021. The 2022 preliminary figure issued by Ford means the F-Series is down 12 per cent from the previous year.
Much of this drop is likely attributable to global supply chain issues that affected most industries. Monthly sales figures seem to be holding up well towards the end of the year, so it’s unclear what impact inflation, rising interest rates, and the general economic climate are having right now.
F-150 Lightning
According to numbers from Car Sales Base, the last time fewer than 650,000 F-Series trucks were sold per annum was in 2012. The large Ford’s modern nadir was 2009 when just 413,625 F-Series models found new homes in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that sent many companies into bankruptcy, including rivals General Motors and Chrysler.
Depending on your thoughts on badge engineering, you could argue GM’s large pickups deserve the 2022 US sales crown.
Although GM has yet to provide any figures, we expect the combined sales figures for the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra should be around 700,000, or 60,000 more than the F-Series.
Since the pandemic struck, the Silverado and Sierra have cumulatively outsold the F-Series with 778,689 moved in 2021, and 848,200 in 2020. Prior to this, the F-Series outsold the GM twins for the entire 2010s.
As for the Ram pickup range, we think it will notch up around 480,000 sales in 2022.
MORE: Everything Ford F-150
