Daimler Truck Q1 units fell 9%

Daimler Truck sold 68,849 vehicles in the first quarter of 2026, down from 75,758 a year earlier, and the biggest drag came from North America, where unit sales fell 25% to 29,432. (reuters.com) That is a sharp reversal for the company’s largest truck market outside Europe. In the first quarter of 2025, Trucks North America sold 38,992 units, so this year’s 29,432 means nearly 9,600 fewer trucks moved through dealers in one quarter. (daimlertruck.com) Daimler Truck is not a niche manufacturer. Its North American business includes Freightliner and Western Star, and the group said in March that it remained the market leader in North America for medium- and heavy-duty trucks even after a weak 2025 market. (daimlertruck.com) The slowdown did not hit every region the same way. Daimler Truck’s Mercedes-Benz Trucks segment sold 33,446 units in the first quarter of 2025, while Trucks Asia sold 24,772 and Daimler Buses sold 6,206, which shows how heavily this latest drop is tied to the North American side of the business. (daimlertruck.com) The company had already been warning that 2026 would be tricky in the United States. Chief Financial Officer Eva Scherer said in March that the impact from United States tariffs would be “significantly higher” in 2026 after 25% duties introduced in November 2025, and Daimler Truck’s full-year outlook still assumed tariff effects would rise even as volumes improved. (reuters.com) (daimlertruck.com) Truck sales also move in long cycles, because fleets buy expensive tractors in batches and dealers finance inventory while they wait for buyers. Daimler Truck’s 2025 annual report shows its Financial Services arm as a separate segment, which matters because weaker truck demand can ripple from factories to dealer lots to lenders. (daimlertruck.com) The odd part is that order data in North America has recently been getting better while Daimler’s delivered units are getting worse. FTR said preliminary Class 8 orders in March 2026 were 38,200 units, up 137% from a year earlier, which suggests fleets may be signing purchase orders again even though first-quarter deliveries stayed soft. (ttnews.com) ACT Research has been telling the same story from a different angle. Its March 2026 outlook said Class 8 production was staying disciplined while order intake strengthened, which is what a truck maker does when it wants to protect pricing and avoid stuffing dealers with unsold inventory. (actresearch.net) That makes this quarter look less like a collapse in trucking and more like a reset in timing. Daimler Truck’s own 2026 outlook still pegs the North American heavy-duty market at 250,000 to 290,000 units, versus 258,000 in 2025, so the company is still planning around a market that is weak but not frozen. (daimlertruck.com) The next hard checkpoint is May 6, 2026, when Daimler Truck said it will publish full first-quarter financial and non-financial results. That report should show whether the 29,432 North American units were mostly a demand problem, a tariff problem, or a deliberate production pullback while the order book rebuilt. (daimlertruck.com)