A semitruck normally takes just 10 weeks to produce.
But now, companies are waiting seven to eight months for their new truck, said Michael DiCecco, executive managing director of Huntington Bank's asset-finance sector.
"It's a pretty hefty backlog," DiCecco told Business Insider.
The last year has been anything but normal for the freight-truck industry, leading to that long wait time.
A safety law cut truck-driver capacity, forcing retail behemoths like Walmart to advertise for new truck drivers on television and overhaul their training process. Spot rates to move goods regularly broke records in 2018. And, as a result, the price of consumer products, ranging from goods on Amazon Prime to Hasbro toys to Tyson Foods meat, crept up to make up for the skyrocketing cost of freight.
Now the freight market is slowing down, trucking analysts told Business Insider. Steve Tam, vice president of ACT Research, said order numbers for December 2018 were "indicative of a normal or average market."
"Freight is still growing at this point," Tam told Business Insider. "It's just that it's growing at a slower pace."
While orders have slowed considerably from the three-digit year-over-year growth rates of 2018, the backlog of orders is still filling up. That wait time was about six months in August 2018. Then it expanded to a surprising nine months in Q3 2018. Now, as companies have caught up to orders, it's back to seven to eight months.
Read more: New truck orders plunged by 43% in December, but trucking insiders remain strangely cheery
In total, Tam said, there's a backlog of about 300,000 trucks right now. Usually it's about 80,000 to 100,000 units.
What that means for retailers, manufacturers, and others is that, even though orders have slowed, the production side still needs time to catch up to the craziness of 2018.
