This Is the Best-Selling Car in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 18, 10:36AM EDT

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This Is the Best-Selling Car in America — © shaunl / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

The car industry has been in extreme turmoil since the start of the year. First, car companies were hit by pent-up demand from people who could not shop during the pandemic. Then, the shortage of semiconductor chips used in vehicle electronic systems choked off supply. Manufacturers started to shutter assembly lines, and their revenues and forecasts for the balance of the year fell.

A solid year in the U.S. car industry is when 17 million cars and light trucks are sold. Cox Automotive forecasts that shortages of vehicles will push that down to slightly over 12 million. There is a very good chance that will not change in early 2022. One consequence of these shortages is that both new and used car prices have risen to the highest levels in history. The number of years people keep cars rose to an average of 11.9 in 2020. That also may be a consequence of the new car shortage.

Despite the shortages, car-buying patterns have not changed much. A decade ago, people increasingly bought fewer sedans and more sport utility vehicles, crossovers and pickups. One theory about why this happened was a decline in gasoline prices. Sedans generally get better gas mileage. The problem was so severe that Ford abandoned almost its entire line of cars in favor of its hot-selling pickups and SUVs

Research website Good Car/Bad Car looked at sales by car model in the United States through the first three-quarters of 2021. The three American full-sized pickups usually top the list. So far this year, that is true again. The best-selling vehicle in America for four decades has been the Ford F-Series pickup. It led the first three-quarters again with sales of 534,830. It was followed by the Ram pickup at 434,773. In third place was GM’s pickup flagship, the Chevy Silverado.

One of the most notable items of car news this year is that the Ford F-Series will have an electric engine version, an acknowledgment by Ford that the future may well not be gasoline-powered engines.

Click here to see which is the fastest-selling car in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.