Small Truck Sales: Just How Popular Are the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz So Far?

The Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz have been on sale for a little while now - but just how popular is each truck? Let's take a closer look!

(Images: Ford, Hyundai)

We’re a good way through 2022 now, so…just how popular are the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz?

July’s full-size and midsize truck sales reveal just how well each manufacturer — those that report monthly figures, anyway — managed with the truck-buying public. There are some interesting points there, such as how well the new Toyota Tundra is doing as well as the surprising popularity of the Honda Ridgeline. Two small trucks technically sit outside that segment, though, and I was curious how these two are duking it out in what is (at least in the modern sense) a fresh market: the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz.

Even on anecdotal evidence, Ford has a clear winner on its hands with the Maverick. Demand is still huge, and the Blue Oval’s striking while the iron’s hot with the more off-road focused Tremor. Having both a fuel-efficient hybrid model and a turbocharged, all-wheel drive variant no doubt drove higher sales.

As for the Santa Cruz, the tiny truck (again, by ‘modern’ standards) was certainly a long time in the making. Now that it’s here, however, it has also gone down fairly well with the public at-large. I don’t know about you, but I have seen quite a few of them roaming the streets. Edit: I’ve been informed by my colleagues that ‘you don’t see any of them’ driving around, so maybe it is just me.

But enough hamming, what about the numbers?

The Ford is the clear winner — but it’s closer than you might think

Last month, Ford dealers shifted 6,720 trucks. In fact, it outsold the larger Ranger by 70%, and it was nearly as possible as the closely related Bronco Sport SUV. Hyundai, for its part, moved 2,801 Santa Cruzes.

Zooming out to the year-to-date sales, we see a similar picture play out through July 2022. The Ford Maverick sold 45,473 examples, per Ford’s latest sales release. The Hyundai? More like 21,004 trucks.

“That’s a landslide!”, you might say. True, the Ford Maverick does currently outsell the Hyundai Santa Cruz by between 2.2 and 2.4 to 1. It depends on your perspective, but two main takeaways here are that the Maverick is solidly popular and that Hyundai’s first crack at a pickup is doing pretty decent in its own right. At least that’s my view.

Have you picked up either a Maverick or a Santa Cruz? What do you think of it so far? Check out more on both trucks below!

Correction: Fixed a typo that said “outside” when it should have been “outsold”. Apologies for the error.