Of Ford owners who traded in a truck for a new vehicle between September 2025 and August 2026, 66.2 percent bought another Ford. That is the highest loyalty rate in J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Automotive Brand Loyalty Study, released on Oct. 6, and it is the fifth consecutive year Ford has finished first among truck brands. Toyota placed second in trucks at 62.2 percent.
Ford’s mark sits 16 points above the study’s industry average of 50.2 percent, and it is the highest of the 10 segment-leading and runner-up rates the study published, ahead of Toyota’s 64.8 percent in mass market cars.
The loyalty formula behind 66.2 percent
J.D. Power defines loyalty as the share of owners who buy the same brand when they trade in a vehicle for a new one. The calculation draws on the Power Information Network, covers transactions from September 2025 through August 2026 with all model years traded in, and counts only sales at new-vehicle franchise dealers. The study spans five segments: premium car, premium SUV, mass market car, mass market SUV and truck, and this is its eighth year, according to J.D. Power’s release.
The Ford figure is therefore a brand rate inside the truck segment, not a rate for every Ford buyer and not a measure of all truck shoppers. It says that roughly two of every three owners trading in a vehicle counted in the truck segment went back to the Ford badge, while the remaining third chose a different brand. The release does not publish the number of transactions behind each rate, so the percentage is the only scale the study offers.
Porsche, Lexus and Toyota across the other four segments
Four segment winners cleared 60 percent, per the wire version of the Business Wire release. Porsche led premium cars at 61.3 percent, with BMW second at 49.3 percent. Lexus led premium SUVs at 59.2 percent ahead of BMW at 56.4 percent. Toyota took mass market cars at 64.8 percent, ahead of Honda at 57.5 percent, and mass market SUVs at 63.8 percent, ahead of Honda at 63.0 percent.
Toyota is the only brand that ranks in the top two of three segments: first in mass market cars and SUVs, second in trucks. That makes the truck gap, 66.2 percent against 62.2 percent, the one place where Toyota trails the leader. Ford is first in trucks and does not appear among the top two of the four car and SUV categories, so its loyalty position rests entirely on one segment.
Porsche’s premium car lead is the fifth in a row, while Lexus has now held premium SUVs for three straight years.
A slight slip from 2025 and a year of avoided tariff damage
Ford’s reading is slightly lower than a year ago. The 2025 study put Ford at 66.6 percent in trucks, its fourth straight lead, with Toyota at 61.2 percent, and a 49 percent industry average. The 2026 industry average of 50.2 percent is up from that 49 percent, so the overall market gained 1.2 points while the truck leader gave back 0.4 points and Toyota gained a full point, narrowing the gap between first and second from 5.4 points to 4.0.
Context for the 2026 results comes from how the market behaved over the transaction period. Automakers faced new import costs and an uncertain economy, and a loyalty study measuring trade-in behavior could easily have recorded a wave of owners walking away from brands whose prices had risen. J.D. Power’s reading is that this largely did not happen, because the price pressure stayed with manufacturers instead of reaching the sticker. Tyson Jominy, J.D. Power’s senior vice president of OEM customer success, described the period as “a year of avoided chaos.” Tariffs and economic uncertainty had the potential to disrupt loyalty, the release says, but automakers largely absorbed added costs rather than passing them to consumers. Jominy said some segments are now approaching the loyalty levels of pickup trucks, which the release calls exceptionally strong.
Ford’s third-quarter sales release
Ford’s own numbers describe a company with its trucks holding up while the rest of the lineup shrinks. In its third-quarter sales release dated Oct. 2, Ford reported 509,764 vehicles, down 6.6 percent, with the decline attributed to planned portfolio changes including the phase-out of the Escape and Corsair. F-Series sales rose 2.4 percent in September to 67,448 trucks and reached 561,508 through September, while the Maverick hybrid set a quarterly record of 27,793.
Andrew Frick, president of Ford Blue and Model e, said in the company’s quarterly results account that Ford delivered a solid quarter and continued to gain retail share adjusted for the Escape and Corsair sunset. Loyalty and sales are different measures, and the study does not state how many of the Ford truck repurchases it counted, only the rate at which they occurred.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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