O’Leary speaks to Transportation Topics reporters in Washington on July 9. (Seth Clevenger/Transportation Topics)
key takeaways:
- Daimler Trucks 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 following a three-year freight slowdown, with DTNA reporting an 8% year-over-year second quarter sales increase and a 41.6% increase from the first quarter.
- DTNA plans to re-hire 400 employees and add 200 more employees at its North Carolina plant, with strong Class 8 orders being monitored, which could prompt updated market forecasts.
CEO John O’Leary said Daimler Trucks North America expects truck demand to continue to accelerate in the second half of 2026.
O’Leary told Transport Topics that the parent company of Freightliner and Western Star is seeing heavy replacement demand, particularly from large highway fleets.
“There’s definitely some pent-up demand on the replacement side that we’re starting to see in the field, and I would expect to see more of that,” O’Leary said. “There has been a lot of purchasing reduction over the last three years because of this freight downturn, where they have aged their fleets, not because they wanted to do that, but just because the profitability of their businesses was not as strong.”
“A truck is just a tool that our customers use to make money. A truck is just that. It’s not like a passenger car where it makes a statement about your social value or something like that. It’s a tool to make money. That’s what people use it for,” he said.
Parent company Daimler Truck said on July 8 that DTNA sales of trucks and buses rose 8% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, the first quarterly sales growth compared with six quarters a year earlier.
Portland, Ore.-based DTNA – which also includes Thomas Built Buses – sold 41,687 vehicles in the second quarter, compared with 38,580 trucks and school buses in the year-ago period, marking the first year-over-year quarterly increase since the third quarter of 2024.
But DTNA’s second-quarter sales surged 41.6% compared with the first three months of 2026 as carriers grew confident in the ongoing boom in the freight market.
DTNA sales fell 8% year on year to 71,119 trucks and buses in the first half of 2026, from 77,572 vehicles in the year-ago period.
A Freightliner Cascadia. (Daimler Trucks North America)
O’Leary told TT at the July 9 meeting that as a result of the ongoing rebound, DTNA is ready to boost the workforce at its Mount Holly manufacturing plant in North Carolina.
The plant, which focuses on the production of Freightliner trucks, will bring back 400 employees laid off in July 2025 as part of 2,000 production plant job cuts at North American DTNA manufacturing facilities.
Additionally, DTNA plans to hire an additional 200 employees at the Mount Holly facility by the end of 2026 as part of plans to add a second shift.
Along with the Cleveland and Gastonia facilities, Mount Holly forms the center of manufacturing capacity in the Carolinas for America’s largest heavy-duty truck manufacturer. 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 workers in July 2025 from five North American production sites: Mount Holly and Gastonia; Detroit; Portland, Ore.; and Saltillo, Mexico.
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Freightliner’s Saltillo and Santiago Tianguistenco plants in Mexico built 9,379 trucks in June, a 9.6% increase compared with 8,554 trucks in the same month in 2025 and a 0.3% increase compared with 9,348 trucks in May.
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During the first half of 2026, plants built 44,380 trucks, down 5.9% from 47,174 vehicles in the year-ago period. O’Leary told TT that DTNA has not yet brought back any of the Saltillo employees laid off in 2025.
Daimler Trucks said when it released its first-quarter 2026 earnings on May 6 that it still expected sales in the North American heavy-duty market to be between 250,000 and 290,000 trucks, but the recent increase in orders and sales could lead to a revision. Daimler Trucks is scheduled to report full earnings for the second quarter on Aug. 7.
Better sales are expected in the third quarter of 2026, with ACT Research data released July 3 showing that June orders increased by more than 100% year over year for the fifth consecutive month.
Preliminary ACT data shows North American Class 8 orders totaled 31,400 trucks in June, up 231% from the year-ago period. Orders increased for the seventh consecutive month year on year in June.
That said, O’Leary told TT that the commercial segment of the Class 8 market has remained largely flat, partly as a result of high demand over the past few years, but also because commercial fleet owners have longer replacement cycles than their on-highway peers.
“A lot of the demand for it over the last three years… was quite strong,” he said of commercial fleet appetite. “And I don’t know that there’s that much new demand out there. Some of it has been met.”
