Photo : Ram

My teenage cousin once removed recently asked me if I preferred Chevy trucks or Ford trucks, and I wanted to tell him that was the most goddamn boring and played out car debate possibly ever had, but I didn’t because he is a teen. In any case, it’s also outdated, because Ram.


Ram has been beating Chevy for a while now, but today they released figures confirming that it was the first time for a full year that Ram had sold more pickup trucks than Chevy. Ram sold 633,694 pickup trucks in 2019, firmly higher than the 575,600 Silverados sold in that period, but lower than the 802,962 pickups GM sold in total, if you add in GMC.

And so before you say anything, yes, GM is still beating Ram, but Chevy alone isn’t any longer. That and this time it didn’t for an entire year’s worth of sales numbers for the first time.


These figures don’t matter for a couple of reasons, namely that sales volumes don’t have much to do with profit since Ram, in particular, uses a lot of sales incentives to push up sales numbers of its trucks. They also don’t matter because GM will tell you that it makes piles and piles of money on every truck it does sell, and 802,962 trucks is a healthy number.

It also doesn’t matter to buyers, since there’s no danger of these trucks going off the market or changing significantly soon (except, of course, for the coming electrification of trucks, but I suspect their internal combustion versions will be around for a good long while).

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It also doesn’t matter because Ford has routinely kicked the shit out of both Chevy and Ram for decades.

So what that leaves us with is a tedious debate about whether this matters to anyone who doesn’t work at GM or Ram or who isn’t a shareholder of those companies, and the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that it does. You’ll find them in the comments here! I get it; car buying is an emotional thing, and people get very attached to something they’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in.


And perhaps I should’ve said something like everything that I said above to my teen relative . Instead I said, “Chevy?! I guess?!” If he asks me again in a few years I’ll be forced to explain in any case that I’m sorry, I’m busy, I simply can’t have this conversation any more for the rest of my life.

Update, Saturday, 10:00 a.m.: My brain short-circuited and I mistakenly referred to a cousin once removed as a nephew. This was possibly Freudian or some such but I’m not sure how. The error has been corrected.