As every month of the year rolls by the body that purports to represent the truck makers in this country, the Truck Industry Council or TIC as it calls itself, publishes its monthly tally of how many trucks and heavy vans have been registered in Australia for the preceding four weeks and adds up the year to date totals up to that point.
Recently those figures have reflected a downturn in the truck market of reasonably large proportions, and this is something publications like ours and others in the industry dutifully report.
However one glaring anomally is sitting there unaddressed in recent times and that is how many of the various ‘unreported Chinese brands that have been introduced into he Australian market are going unreported?
The simple matter is that many of the new crop of Chinese truck brands are not paying members of TIC and therefore the trucks they sell here aren’t counted in the monthly T-Mark truck tracker numbers that are emailed out to the industry and the truck media on the second day of every month.
The obvious question is exactly how many of these newly introduced Chinese brands such as Sitrak and FAW among others are actually finding their way on to our roads and if so how many are actually taking sales numbers away from established European, Japanese and American brands, and potentially warping the monthly truck sales figures significantly?
One truck industry figure, who asked not to be named told us that he thought that naturally he believes that all brands active in the market should report to a single source in order to make the stats useful for market monitoring and planning.
“The 97 units the heavy duty sector was down on September last year may well be covered in full, or at least in part, by deliveries from the various Chinese non reporters, which would mean that the market is not actually down by 7.9 per cent and that it may well even be up,” the industry insider told us.
“This issue is also alive and well within the car industry’s FCAI total market figures as well, and they are not in my personal opinion helping themselves, their members or the industry, regulators and legislators by presenting an increasingly misty picture of the total industry volume sales situation,” he added.
Are suggested that maybe we should ask the Chinese importers to share their figures and that, in a slightly sarcastic tone, that they, as good corporate citizens in Australia surely would be delighted to have their numbers included!
Perhaps we should but several attempts to make media enquiries with these brands has resulted in the sound of crickets, “no response your honour”, has been the answer so far.
Sitrak is a Chinese manufactured brand of heavy duty trucks which is part of Sinotruk, the Chinese National Heavy Duty Truck Group or CNHTC and has been available in Australia since about 2019 and has by all reports, and certainly through sightings on our main roads and highways, rapidly expanded its presence here.
If the cabs on Sitrak trucks look familiar then they probably are, as the brand is built on a major joint-venture partnership with well established German truck manufacturer MAN, which is a part of the Volkswagen controlled Traton conglomerate.
This collaboration blends what is a very European styled cab with mechanical design and components also largely designed and engineered by the German truck maker, but with one very important difference. price!
Exactly what retail or fleet prices for Sitrak vehicles sold in Australia are is a tough question, as it often is for any truck brand, established or otherwise in this country. However there is no doubt that the Chinese brand and its dealers in Australia are selling at highly competitive pricing.
Although truck pricing is a more high guarded secret than the formula for Coca-Cola or the exact recipe for KFC’s 11 herbs and spices, our information is that in some instances Sitrak’s actual pricing is almost half that of established brands in this market.
While the established brands will always champion their credentials and long history of sales and service back up as well as parts provision, the Chinese value proposition is no doubt proving a compelling opportunity of some operators. Who, after all, would not at least take a look at a truck that ostensibly measures up as a Chinese built version of an established and at times respected European brand selling for, what we are lead to believe is half the price of most other similar trucks in the market? This is particularly so in the straightened economic times we are operating in at the moment.
While anecdotally at least, this publication has spotted a lot of Sitraks on the road, not just in city and urban areas but out on the interstate motorways such as the M1 Pacific and M31 Hume in recent months and many wearing the branding of long established fleets, which in the past have been major customers of European and US brand heavy duty models exclusively.
No business could ignore the fact that perhaps purchasing one of these trucks means you could actually get virtually two of them for the price of one established European or US branded truck, particularly given there is not a lot of difference in appearance and spec from in this instance the donor company MAN.
On its Australian website Sitrak does not mention that its Chinese partnership is with the MAN brand , it simply and slightly ungrammatically explains it is “a collaboration between Sintruck and German company”.
As we enter the final quarter of 2026 the Australian truck and heavy commercial market has on the surface at least continued a sales slide which has peresisted since late last year, and finished September with a drop of just over 500 units or 13.3 per cent compared with the figures from this time last year.
So the question is how much of that drop in sales according to the numbers reported by TIC , can be accounted for by the increasing sales of Chinese brands whose numbers go unreported. It is difficult to say exactly how any trucks Sitrak has sold but viewing the Australian Government’s Vehicle Recall website give a small window into the numbers. According to that website Sitrak or Sinotruck has been the subject of a total of 13 recalls in Australia in the past 12 months with various recalls relating to its top of the range C9 prime mover, the C7 prime movers , its G7 rigid tippers and T5G 8x4s which we believe are the backbone of the company’s offering to the concrete industry as ready to packaged agitator models.
If you start adding up the number of trucks each of these recalls relate to you can get at least part of the picture in terms of how many vehicles the company has delivered here.
For instance the website tells us that between 2020 and last year it sold 648 of the T5G agitator models that were listed for a recall, which is a fair swag of trucks even over five years and orders that any other truck brand would not have ignored.
There have been three recalls for Sitrak’s supposed flagship C9 6×4 15 lite 660hp prime mover, one covering 2025 and 26 delivered models that tallied a total of 46 units, another for 2024-25 model that totalled 42 trucks and another seperate one that relates to 24 of its 2025 models.
Another bigger Sitrak recall listed on the Government’s website was for the C7H 6×4 13 litre 540hp prime mover sold between 2020 and 25, which totalled 437 trucks.
Of course these numbers might not relate to every truck the brand sold here in those model variants, just the ones with recall issues, but it does give some indicator that they are moving plenty of metal, and that TIC’s reporting system has some big holes in it, that some would say you could drive a truck through!
Certainly TIC is are publishing numbers that are not reflecting the full picture of the Australian market and only represent brands that are willing to pay a subscription to be a part of TIC.
There was a similar distortion in numbers that happened with the TIC numbers in 2025 when several brands of vans, which were not TIC members, finally joined the club and started reporting their numbers. The result was that all of a sudden Chinese van brand LDV was the second largest seller of heavy vans coming in not far behind market leader Mercedes-Benz, distorting the true picture of the market, which had shown a downturn in numbers, until LDV volume started to be reported, which meant the van segment wasn’t down but in actual fact had grown.
There was also a significant distortion int he Australian car market numbers which are managed by TIC’s opposite number in the car industry, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries or FCAI. For quite a few years it numbers did not reflect any sales of popular electric only brand Tesla. When the brand did join the FCAI, suddenly Tesla was a top ten brand and again reflected a healthier market than the one the Chamber’s numbers had actually been indicating.
While Sitrak is the most prominent Chinese heavy truck brand selling here the other brand is FAW, is also supposedly selling trucks in Australia but we have to admit we have not seen many FAWs actually plying their trade on Aussie highways. Certainly the Government website does not show any FAW recalls, which could either indicate that they are faultless and have no reportable recall notices, or that they simply haven’t sold many trucks.
Here at Truck and Bus News we have to admit the only actual FAW we have seen on the road so far is the one the company provided to Supercar team Tickford Racing, however that was in season 2025 and we noticed that the team’s transporter at last weekend’s Bathurst 1000 was being hauled by a Paccar brand prime mover.
So where to from here? We don’t have a solution, however one has to say that if Sitrak and other non reporting brands are actually selling the sort of numbers we believe they maybe already are selling, then the TIC T-Mark numbers are neither accurate nor truly indicative of the complexion and health of the truck and van market in this country.
Perhaps we need a new system that reflects all trucks sold in this country not just the members of the ‘Club’ that is TIC.
