Texas truck sales anemic so far this year

So we doubt we'll live to see the day when Texans give up their pickup trucks — but for a change, truck sales in Texas are almost flat this year compared with the same period in 2005, and it took dealers a longer time to sell trucks during the summer. Truck sales are better in Texas and Oklahoma than in the rest of the country because the oil business is doing well and companies are replacing old trucks and adding new ones to their fleets:

"Retail may be kind of flat compared to last year, but commercial is up significantly," said Carroll Smith, owner of Monument Chevrolet in Pasadena. "I am almost double commercial sales."

It has added up to an overall 1 percent increase in sales over the last year. What's more, trucks are sitting on lots longer than they used to: It takes dealers an average of 60 to 65 days to sell a truck, but in Houston, trucks took an average of 79 days to sell in August (still showing a brisker pace than the national average, 89 days).

That doesn't mean you're going to see less trucks on the road. In fact, if automakers have their way, you'll not only see more, but they'll be bigger: Toyota has redesigned its Tundra and announced it will manufacture the truck in San Antonio; Ford, the truck market leader, keeps tabs on Texan tastes and trends through its network of dealers (obviously, they failed to tell Ford to pull that stupid Taylor Hicks commercial off the air as quickly as possible). It's important to car makers to keep selling a lot of trucks because the vehicles are cheap to make and turn a huge profit, and Texas, the heart of truckdom, is the ideal target market. "We know if we can make [a product] work there, then we can make it rock everywhere else in the nation," Ford marketer Ben Poore said.