You think Australia loves its pick-up trucks? The US has a serious fetish for them

Sales figures aren't what you usually come to Oversteer to read, but there are some numbers that have to be seen to be believed. Let's get number nerdy.

Get this - the top three biggest-selling vehicles in the United States for 2017 were all utes, or pick-up trucks, or whatever you want to call them. That's not such a big deal, until you consider just how many of these suckers were sold.

Take the big guy, the Ford F-Series - not just the F-150, but the entire range of F-Series trucks.

In 2017,  there were 896,764 units sold.

Think about that.

The Chevrolet Silverado was the second-best seller in the US.

Let's contextualise that number. In 2017, the entire Australian new car market saw almost 1.19 million vehicles sold. So, there were almost as many Ford utes sold to Americans in the same period. It's staggering.

Let's break it down: so 896,764 per year means approximately 2457 per day. Which means more than 100 per hour - 102.37032, to be precise. And that means that 1.7 F-Series trucks are sold per minute.

Or, if you want to think about it in another mind-blowing way, there's a new F Truck sold every 35 seconds.

Nuts, right?

The Dodge Ram was the third most popular, with 500,723 sales.

Then consider that the second-best seller was the Chevrolet Silverado, with 585,684 examples sold. And third was the Dodge Ram, with 500,723 sales.

So, combined, the top three selling pick-ups for 2017 in the US totalled 1,983,171 sales. Or 40 per cent more than the entire Australian new vehicle market, including sedans, wagons, hatches, SUVs, utes and trucks.

In 2017 our best-selling vehicle was the Toyota HiLux, which managed a comparatively meagre 47,093 sales. Again, for context, that's what Ford sells of the F-Series in just over 19 days in the US.

Yeah, we may have gone pick-up mad, but we're a long, long way from the benchmark level the American market has set for the world.

In 2017 our best-selling vehicle was the Toyota HiLux, which managed a comparatively meagre 47,093 sales.

Do you like these big trucks? Let us know in the comments section below.