What does a truck actual cost?
It’s surprisingly difficult for people other than truck OEMs to figure this out, or to figure out why it is so difficult to find out how much a truck actually costs. Even some OEM insiders have challenges understanding what a vehicle actually costs. The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) advocated for greater transparency in truck pricing in its 2025 report, Battery Electric Commercial Vehicle Pricing in the United States along with more recent social media discussions. The ICCT states simply, “Commercial vehicle prices are often not publicly available.”
New automobiles have had standard window stickers since 1959. The window sticker has evolved over time to include more information, but its starting point focused on providing basic pricing information to consumers.
Between 1955 and 1958, the Senate Auto Marketing Practices Subcommittee held hearings and researched automotive pricing practices. What came out of these hearings was the Monroney-Thurmond price-disclosure bill, which was enacted in 1958, requiring all new automobiles sold after Jan. 1, 1959, to carry standardized pricing information.
An article in the April 1958 issue of Automotive News stated that an overwhelming majority of National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) members approved of the bill, stating it would “restore sanity to pricing and advertising practices” in the automotive industry. One NADA executive testifying before the subcommittee said, “The measure will greatly obliterate false and misleading advertising, price packing, unethical practices, confusion in the marketplace and causes underlying buyer resistance.”
Automotive News June 23, 1958Automotive News
A key element of the Monroney window sticker is the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). This is a directional price established by the OEM to reflect a national price recommended by the manufacturer as a basis for dealers and customers to negotiate actual sales pricing.
If cars and light trucks have the Monroney-Thurmond window sticker requirement, why don’t Class 8 trucks have it?
I can only conjecture. One argument is that Class 8 trucks are too complicated and vary significantly.
I was recently wandering around a car dealership lot waiting for my car to be serviced. I was thinking, “Window stickers now have a tremendous amount of useful information to help buyers compare vehicles.” Those vehicles come in tremendous variations, just like Class 8 trucks. Admittedly, Class 8 truck option permutations dwarf those of automobiles, but still, most car models also come in a surprising number of variations.
We live in a world of data, and whether your ice cream store sells 31 flavors like Baskin-Robbins originally did, Ben & Jerry’s now with nearly 100, or Baskin-Robbins which now has 1,400, it’s all just data. AI doesn’t care how many permutations there are of something, only that the data is digitally available to be analyzed. Whether a particular Cascadia, VNR, or other model had 20,000 different permutations in one year, the AI algorithms will sort them to find commonalities. This type of sorting has been happening for years at OEMs as part of average, banking, and trading categorization of vehicles under GHG rules. It just hasn’t been happening publicly.
Another argument against Monroney-like Class 8 window stickers showing MSRP is that the majority of Class 8 trucks in the U.S. are ordered by customers. This is much different than most car-buying experiences of picking from the available inventory off a car dealer’s lot. The order process for trucks has evolved over decades to give truck buyers the feeling they can get exactly what they want, specifying it to be built-to-order and locking in a time slot for it to be built. To some degree, they can get just what they want.
Published option content choices for Class 8 trucks create literally millions of potential permutations. Then there are also unpublished options which specific customers may negotiate with OEMs to include on their trucks. If you are a valuable enough customer, the market cycle is in your favor, and you are willing to pay, it’s likely you can get your way.
But all those custom truck orders with their quantities of option permutations still work out to be just a few pages of build instructions on the assembly line. It’s just data listing which parts go on each truck. Each truck may have thousands of parts, but someone on the factory floor gets a neat, clean build sheet and then assembles the truck. Each truck built on the line can be completely different, but each has its digital build paper, just like automotive OEMs build their millions of cars and light trucks.
It’s not just the build paper that has a digital database. The sales and marketing people at the OEMs and dealerships all have access to computer-based pricing systems that define what is being sold and which options are selected to determine what each truck order should cost. Sure, final truck pricing, as with cars, involves negotiation on many levels, including establishing the trade-in value of the vehicle being turned in. Then there are the standard factors like taxes and licensing, various warranty offerings, etc.
All that order information for each truck sits in a computer. The data is there. It’s just not publicly available. There are, however, instances where the pricing mystery is laid open to public viewing.
The ICCT points out that various state incentive programs may require visibility into actual prices for vehicles securing grants. Creative researchers scouring publicly available sales contracts from city, county, state, or federal customers also may find hard price data on what was purchased.
Another source is information providers like IHS Markit/J.D. Power, which compile used truck pricing from auctions. Knowing the year, mileage, and details of the truck models, they have a rough idea of the depreciation rate of various categories of trucks over the years. A little bit of backward forecasting of this data can get to an estimated new-vehicle sales price. But it’s still somewhat of a mathematical guess.
Then there are surveys. These can be private or public. But surveys capture opinions—what the person being surveyed is willing to say—not necessarily factual, verifiable numbers. Eyewitness accounts in lawsuits are always taken with a grain of salt, and so too should surveys of pricing from people who may or may not actually have firsthand numbers.
The digital data of what is built and how much each truck costs is out there. The fleets know. The OEMs know. The dealers know. The data is just not publicly available.
I told the ICCT in an interview that it’s because U.S. manufacturers, dealers, and fleets seem to believe truck pricing is proprietary information critical to their commercial competitiveness.
Competitors also must take extreme care not to create any suggestion that sharing pricing information is being done in ways that could be interpreted as price-fixing under antitrust regulations.
Somehow for 67 years, the automotive industry has been able to post pricing on Monroney-Thurmond window stickers without running afoul of Antitrust rules. Many automotive websites have publicly published MSRPs of cars and light trucks from different brands. Most OEMs even have websites where you can estimate an MSRP for a vehicle with the option content of your own choice.
Couldn’t Class 8 truck makers find some way to document a publicly available MSRP for each of their trucks?
Wouldn’t fleets find this information valuable to help them make decisions when comparing and contrasting vehicles?
Would the competitive nature of public MSRP information help increase sales at some OEMs?
Would it help reduce fleet costs?
I’ll leave that analysis of competitiveness to the economic experts to chew on, but the resounding acceptance and adoption of Monroney-Thurmond window stickers for cars and light trucks suggest that there is some room to challenge the assumption that Class 8 truck pricing should be secret.
