Truck OEMs aren’t expected to get a 2026 reprieve from the soft truck sales and orders that plagued the market last year. While McKinsey & Company analysts see few signs of hope for the first half of this year, they still predict North America will outpace other global markets through 2035 at a rate of 0.7% per year. The company expects North American medium- and heavy-duty truck sales to grow from 578,000 units in 2024 to 627,000 units in 2035.
The post-COVID downturn has been driven by overcapacity in the market and increased vehicle prices, due in part to tariffs and inflation. “2025 was extremely challenging, and 2026 is projected to at least start as equally challenging, hopefully recovering toward the tail end of the year,” said Moritz Rittstieg, a McKinsey partner. “This is a tough time for OEMs, particularly with severe hits to profitability and volumes.”
On the demand side, Rittstieg said North American fleet owners are hesitant to buy not because of profitability, but because of uncertainty regarding future business conditions. “Fleets are doing in a cyclical market what they’ve always done: just holding on to equipment longer,” he said. “I think the only recovery point folks are expecting is when the changeover needs to happen because the trucks age out and need to be de-fleeted. But there is some hope that this is going to happen in the second half of this year.”
The clawback of emission regulations in the United States stunted the growth of alternative power technologies and is leading to what McKinsey calls a divergence between electrification in the U.S. versus global markets. Presently, zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) sales represent just 1% of medium- and heavy-duty sales in North America, compared to 18% in China. ZEV sales in the U.S. are forecasted to grow to 13% by 2035, compared to 56% in Europe and the United Kingdom, and 62% in China.
“We've always forecasted China, the European Union, and the United States differently, but now the momentum is just so staggeringly different. China seems to have set their sails and is continuing to ramp up,” said Rittstieg. “Europe is somewhere in between, and in the United States, all the OEMs have pushed their timelines to the right. The order books have plummeted, and it looks like electrification is going to be significantly slower than initially projected.”
Three bright spots in commercial ZEV applications in North America are school buses, final-mile delivery, and yard/terminal tractors. Of the latter, Rittstieg said the segment “looks significantly better when it comes to total cost of ownership and mission fit of what electrification can do in that use case. But in terms of Class 8—the core of the OEM business—it seems a ways out and is not moving forward without regulation that demands it.”
All eyes on autonomy
Autonomous truck development has emerged as one of a few bright spots for research and development efforts among North American commercial vehicle OEMs. As advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) technology continues to improve, the conversation around driverless tractors has moved from the theoretical just 10 years ago to the achievable today.
McKinsey predicts autonomy will shift from hub-to-hub driverless operations to full autonomy soon, without the need for transfer stations for final delivery. The company expects early Level 4 autonomy use cases by 2030, with urban deployments beginning in 2032.
“The engineering problem is largely solved,” said Rittstieg. “There are questions that remain around how the value capture will shake out between the technology-providing startups, OEMs, and then the motor carriers—somebody in there has to put up the cash to scale that quickly. The economics still have to improve to provide a real incentive for fleets to then massively invest in autonomous trucking.”
McKinsey surveys companies involved in autonomous vehicle development, and the expected timelines for commercially viable Level 4 use cases are narrowing. “North America is clearly significantly ahead of Europe and Asia-Pacific,” said Rittstieg. “We think the U.S. market is actually a great one for autonomy. The Chinese market, for different reasons, is a great one too. Seeing these use cases adopted here is something that we look forward to before 2030.”
