Are owner-operators still buying trucks?
There’s no doubt that in the past few years owner-operators have struggled with five-dollar diesel and the worst recession in memory. But have they truly been hit harder than the big fleets? According to registration figures from R.L. Polk, the buying habits of owners of fleets of one to five trucks don’t look markedly different than those of fleets of a thousand-plus. Looking at the last five years of Class 8 new truck registrations, new truck buying peaked in 2006, when the industry as a whole registered more than 274,000 new Class 8 trucks. The little guys registered about 44,500, or about 16 percent of that total; the big guys registered close to 98,000, or about 36 percent of that total. Fast-forward to 2009 (figures for January through November), and new Class 8 truck registrations plummeted to a fraction of the 2006 figures – 87,171 for the whole industry. The 1,000-plus-truck fleets made up a slightly larger percentage of that this time, about 40 percent, but the owner-operator
