Urbanisation reshaping Australian truck market

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Prime Mover Magazine  /  January 5, 2017

After three years of collating quarterly registration data, the Australian Road Transport Suppliers’ Association (ARTSA) has now issued the industry’s first long-term analysis of key heavy vehicle market dynamics.

“With twelve quarters worth of data available*, we can now identify longer-term trends that may have gone unnoticed by looking at quarterly results alone,” said ARTSA CEO, Robert Perkins, who summarised the last three calendar years of data exclusively for CRTNews.

“Looking at the period between 2014 and 2016, what we see is a year-on-year reduction across the heavy trailer and heavy prime mover categories, and a small, yet positive improvement in both medium and heavy rigid truck new registrations,” he explained.

“This year-on-year reduction in total new registrations has been a noticeable trend in previous quarterly reports, too, but with three years of full data, both the trend and its magnitude … become much clearer.”

Perkins said Australia has thus developed a distinct “two-speed market”, where declines in the trailer and prime mover segments are faced with slow but steady growth in the heavy and medium-duty rigid category.

“Overall, total vehicle registrations have gone down around 9.5 per cent,” he explained. “The trailer segment has been leading this trend with a drop of 23 per cent between 2014 and 2016. Prime movers followed with a 15.5 per cent reduction across the two years.

“Meanwhile, both medium and heavy rigid vehicles recorded gains of seven and three per cent, respectively, across the same period.”

Perkins pointed out that the trend was merely a historical observation and that future developments may follow a different pattern. “However, it has become clear that the market is shifting towards more versatile equipment for urban use – arguably because the urban freight task is growing faster than the line-haul equivalent.

“While we can’t predict the future, it seems obvious that new logistical challenges and urbanisation are changing the very fabric of the heavy vehicle market as we know it.”

*ARTSA registration data is based on information supplied by the National Exchange of Vehicle and Driver Information System (NEVDIS).

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