For pretty much your entire adult life, the best-seller chart in America has had one name on top: the Ford F-150. It has been the country’s best-selling vehicle in 15 of the last 16 years, per Automotive News. The only thing that ever interrupted it was the Toyota RAV4, which snuck past for a single year in 2024.
Halfway through 2026, both of them just got passed. And the new number one isn’t exactly a thrilling newcomer.
3…2…1… Yep, it’s the Honda CR-V — the most sensible, nondescript vehicle you’ll ever see on the highway today.
The reason isn’t pure favoritism, either. While the United States clearly loves its oversized trucks and SUVs, this shake-up is mostly a supply story. Ford and Toyota ran low on cars. Honda didn’t.
Everyone else ran out of cars
I think it’s safe to say half the families in America drive a Honda CR-V. It has sold 226,114 units in 2026 so far, which Honda says is an all-time best first half for the model, up 6% over its previous record. People really love driving that thing around.
I’ll never understand it. Fine, it’s practical, reliable, and safe. That’s the whole recipe. Still… yucky.
But it wasn’t just families shoving each other out of the way at the Honda dealership. Sales surged 19% in May and then 30% in June, per Automotive News, right as the two usual chart-toppers hit very different walls.
Ford’s aluminum problem literally caught fire
On the F-150’s side, the trouble started on September 16, 2025, when a fire broke out at the Novelis aluminum plant in Oswego, New York. A second fire hit the same hot mill on November 20, in the exact area where repair work from the first one was underway, according to Novelis filings.
That one facility supplied around 40% of the aluminum sheet used by the US auto industry. And the F-150’s body is, famously, aluminum.
Ford says the shortage cut its estimated F-Series production by more than 50,000 trucks, and executives have warned the whole ordeal could cost the company as much as $2 billion. The automaker added a third shift at its Dearborn plant to claw that volume back.
The good news for truck people, including everyone who read my F-150 versus Tundra face-off: Novelis restarted the Oswego hot mill last month. So the pickup may, well, pick back up. Ford expects most of the recovery to land in the second half of the year.
Toyota broke its own best-seller
The RAV4’s problem was self-inflicted, in the most Toyota way possible. The switch to the sixth-generation model — now hybrid or plug-in hybrid only — required major plant overhauls in Japan and North America, and the launch slipped to February 2026.
Dealers have been left rationing whatever shows up. US deliveries fell 36% in the first half to 153,955 units, and Toyota expects the changeover to cost it about 55,000 RAV4 sales this year, as my colleague reports. One California dealer told Automotive News it had more than 800 customers waiting for an allocation.
Production of the new RAV4 finally started at Toyota’s Kentucky plant in June, which should add roughly 40,000 units before the year ends. Help is coming. It’s just fashionably late.
About that asterisk
Before Ford fans start typing: yes, there’s fine print. Ford doesn’t break out F-150 sales from the rest of the F-Series, so that 209,311 figure is a GlobalData estimate. Count the heavy-duty Super Duty trucks too, and the F-Series as a full line is still America’s most popular nameplate.
Model versus model, though, the crown sits on the CR-V. And Honda’s numbers aren’t just borrowed luck. The hybrid versions alone moved 124,017 units in six months. That’s more than Honda’s entire Acura luxury division sold, period.
Demand is real enough that dealers are down to roughly a 15-day supply of CR-Vs, per Automotive News, and Honda is reportedly considering trimming incentives. With a starting price of $30,920, it’s also one of the more affordable new cars left, at a time when the average new vehicle hovers around $50,000, per Edmunds.
“During May 2026, nearly one out of five shoppers included the CR-V on their top 10 list,” Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, told Automotive News.
Enjoy it while it lasts, Honda
With Novelis back online and Kentucky churning out RAV4s, the CR-V may not hold the lead for long. Both rivals are openly planning second-half comebacks.
But don’t write this one off as a fluke, either. 226,114 people voted with their wallets in six months, and plenty of them cross-shopped everything else on the market first.
So here’s the question Honda gets to enjoy all summer: is America finally falling for the sensible choice, or did the sensible choice just happen to be the only one in stock?
