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Toyota Tacoma Leads Q2 2021 Mid-Size Pickup Truck Sales Battle

As ever, Toyota dominates the mid-size truck segment in the United States. In Q2 2021, the somewhat pricy Tacoma moved 72,847 units versus 51,063 in Q2 2020, which is a market share of 42 percent.
Toyota Tacoma 8 photos
Photo: Toyota
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That’s a tremendous result by all accounts, more so if you remember the glaring drawbacks of the aging Tacoma. Take, for instance, the six-speed automatic that pales in comparison to what Ford offers in the 2021 Ranger.

The 10-speed automatic transmission-equipped truck from the Blue Oval ended the second quarter with a grand total of 34,205 units to its name, representing an improvement of 36.78 percent over last year. But in terms of year-to-date sales, the Ranger sold less than half the volume of the Tacoma at 58,371 pickups compared to 139,296 for the Japanese company.

In third place, and this is very surprising, Jeep moved 29,962 examples of the Gladiator. Even more surprising is Nissan, which posted a 77.53-percent increase for the Frontier over Q2 2020 with 15,615 sales. General Motors, however, appears to have dropped the ball in regard to the microchip crisis.

The biggest automaker of the Big Three in Detroit moved 14,776 units of the Chevrolet Colorado versus 19,843 last year, and the GMC Canyon didn’t fare much better with an increase of 2.33 percent to 5,347 pickups. Even if you add up the numbers, General Motors couldn’t touch the Jeep Gladiator, let alone the segment-leading Toyota Tacoma and Ford Ranger.

To its defense, GM had to shutter the Wentzville, Missouri plant for a long time in the second quarter. The biggest loser from the semiconductor crunch is arguably the Blue Oval, which is still building F-150s without vital chips.

All told, the mid-size segment expanded more than 33 percent to 172,749 units in the second quarter of 2021, which goes to show that people are buying pretty much anything they find on the lot over the semiconductor shortage. As for the Honda Ridgeline, which is a unibody truck based on the mid-size Pilot crossover, that fellow ended the quarter with a colossal improvement of 84.95 percent to 11,800 units in the United States.
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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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