Autoblog

While the big news story surrounding 2007 sales is that Toyota passed Ford as the No. 2 best-selling automaker in the U.S. last year, there were plenty of interesting battles happening between individual models, as well. The truck segment, though shrinking, is still the most competitive in the U.S. market, and 2007 saw the most serious challenge yet to the domestics' market dominance with the introduction of the 2007 Toyota Tundra.

While the F-Series pickup retained its title of Best-Selling Truck for the 31st year in a row (also the Best-Selling Vehicle in the U.S. for the 26th year in a row), its sales fell 13.2% to 690,589. And to think, the F-Series' best-selling year ever was just three years ago in 2004 when it sold 939,511 units. Give the F-Series credit, however, for retaining its No. 1 position despite a brand new Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra on the market. GM's new GMT900 trucks did help the automaker mitigate a similar sales slide, with sales falling only 2.8% to 618,257 for the Silverado and 1.2% to 208,243 for the Sierra in 2007. The Dodge Ram also did well despite the shrinking market, with sales off just 2% at 358,295.

The Toyota Tundra, however, is the story the year...

Follow the jump for more analysis and the raw sales numbers for trucks sold in the U.S. last year.

[Sources: Ford, GM, Chrysler LLC, Toyota, Nissan]
...Its sales were up 57.4% in 2007, a year in which Toyota sold both the old, smaller Tundra early on and the new, larger Tundra for the remainder of the year. Toyota boldly made the claim that it hoped to sell 200,000 Tundras in 2007, which it fell short of achieving by just 3,445 units. It did, however, come within spitting distance of passing the GMC Sierra to become the fourth best-selling truck in the U.S. Despite some quality issues and one official recall, we'd say Toyota overcame the odds to make a significant dent in the market.

And then there's Nissan, which just doesn't offer enough variations of its Titan pickup to be a real player in the segment. Nissan's actively seeking a partner to produce a diesel engine for the Titan, which if such a model were to beat its competitors to market, would help the truck's fortunes tremendously.

Since automakers don't break down their numbers, counting sales of both half-ton and heavy/super-duty trucks together, we can't tell you how, say, the F-150 fared against the new Chevy Silverado 1500. Also keep in mind that trucks were probably the most incentivized vehicles of the past year, with thousands of dollars dumped on the hoods of each to keep them moving off the lots. Nevertheless, the numbers speak for themselves, and they say that people are buying a lot less trucks than they have in a long time.

Ford F-Series: 690,589
Chevy Silverado: 618,257
Dodge Ram: 358,295
GMC Sierra: 208,243
Toyota Tundra: 196,555
Nissan Titan: 65,746