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DTNA’s O’Leary confident of truck demand acceleration
On-highway replacement demand appetite underpins rebound
Key Takeaways:
- Daimler Truck North America expects truck demand to accelerate in the second half of 2026, CEO John O’Leary said, citing rising fleet replacement needs.
- The outlook reflects pent-up demand after a three-year freight downturn, with DTNA posting an 8% year-over-year Q2 sales gain and a 41.6% jump from Q1.
- DTNA plans to rehire 400 workers and add 200 more at its North Carolina plant while monitoring strong Class 8 orders that could prompt updated market forecasts.
Daimler Truck North America expects truck demand to continue to accelerate in the second half of 2026, CEO John O’Leary said.
The parent company of Freightliner and Western Star is seeing heavy replacement demand from larger on-highway fleets in particular, O’Leary told Transport Topics.
“There’s definitely some pent-up demand on the replacement side that we’re starting to see enter the fray, and I would expect to see more of that,” O’Leary said. “There’s been a lot of suppressed purchasing over this freight recession over the last three years where they’ve aged their fleets, not because they necessarily wanted to, but just because the profitability of their businesses wasn’t as strong.”
“A truck is just a tool that our customers use to make money with. That’s all a truck is. It’s not like a passenger car where it makes some statement on your social worth or something like that. It’s a tool to make money with. That’s what people use it for,” he added.
DTNA’s sales of trucks and buses rose 8% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, the first quarterly sales increase compared with a year-ago period in six quarters, parent company Daimler Truck said July 8.
Portland, Ore.-based DTNA — which also comprises Thomas Built Buses — sold 41,687 vehicles in Q2, compared with 38,580 trucks and school buses in the year-ago period, marking the first quarterly year-on-year rise since the third quarter of 2024.
But DTNA’s Q2 sales jumped 41.6% compared with the first three months of 2026 as carrier confidence in the ongoing freight market rebound increased.
DTNA sales fell 8% year over year in the first half of 2026 to 71,119 trucks and buses from 77,572 vehicles in the year-ago period.
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A Freightliner Cascadia. (Daimler Truck North America)
As a result of the ongoing rebound, DTNA is set to boost the workforce at its Mount Holly manufacturing plant in North Carolina, O’Leary told TT in a July 9 meeting.
The plant, which focuses on production of Freightliner trucks, will bring back 400 employees laid off in July 2025 as part of 2,000 production plant job cuts across North American DTNA manufacturing facilities.
In addition, DTNA plans to hire an additional 200 workers at the Mount Holly facility by the end of 2026 as part of plans to add a second shift.
Alongside the Cleveland and Gastonia facilities, Mount Holly forms a nucleus of manufacturing capacity for America’s largest heavy-duty truck maker in the Carolinas. The Cleveland Truck Plant is Freightliner’s largest U.S. manufacturing plant.
Sales and orders were so weak last year that DTNA laid off 2,000 employees at five North American production sites in July 2025: Mount Holly and Gastonia; Detroit; Portland, Ore.; and Saltillo, Mexico.
Freightliner’s Saltillo and Santiago Tianguistenco plants in Mexico built 9,379 trucks in June, a 9.6% year-over-year increase compared with 8,554 trucks in the same month in 2025 and a 0.3% increase compared with 9,348 trucks in May, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
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Through the first half of 2026, the plants manufactured 44,380 trucks, a 5.9% decrease compared with 47,174 vehicles in the year-ago period. O’Leary told TT that DTNA has yet to bring back any Saltillo staff laid off in 2025.
Daimler Truck said when releasing its first-quarter 2026 earnings May 6 that it still expected North American heavy-duty market sales to land between 250,000 and 290,000 trucks, but the recent pickup in orders and sales could prompt a revision. Daimler Truck is scheduled to report full earnings for Q2 on Aug. 7.
Improved sales are expected in the third quarter of 2026, with ACT Research data released July 3 showing June orders rose by more than 100% year over year for the fifth consecutive month.
North American Class 8 orders totaled 31,400 trucks in June, a 231% jump compared with the year-ago period, preliminary ACT data shows. Orders rose year over year in June for a seventh straight month.
That said, O’Leary told TT the vocational segment of the Class 8 market largely remains flat, partly as a consequence of higher demand in the past couple of years, but also because vocational fleet owners’ replacement cycle is longer than that of their on-highway peers.
“A lot of that demand over the last three years … was pretty strong,” he said of vocational fleets’ appetite. “And I don’t know that there’s so much new demand out there. Some of that’s been satiated.”
