Rusty Rush: Well, how about if I stay off of a number Andrew as always. I’m not going to change that. But let me talk a little more broadly, a little more in depth about what I see in the fourth quarter and how we view next year. As I said in the release in Q4, we expect it to be similar, very similar to Q3. When I say that there’s going to be puts and takes, right? It’s different. There’s seasonality involved but there’s puts and there’s takes. We think when it all washes out from a return perspective, what you see it won’t be exactly the same but the results should end up around the same based on what we’ve got falling into October. We know how October is running and fairly flat, but sequentially. So that gives you some outlook, what you should be delivering from a truck sales perspective.
So we — as I said we said in the release Q4 would be about the same, but there’ll be some puts and takes. Looking into next year, well you got to remember that ACT has got the Class 8 market down 22%. Now we like to believe that we can probably do a little better than that. I’m not going to get into exacts in the way of EPS with you, but we like to believe we can do better than that. We do believe, we’ll be glad to say market for us we’ll be down. We’re hoping not that dramatically. But what you’ve got to understand is they just opened up order books in September. You saw the September number. It was like 37,000 units right? People go, oh my goodness, we’ve got this big order intake. Well, I think you’ve got to dive a little deeper into it.
Remember last year September was like 54,000 or so if I remember correctly. And what’s happened is typically the manufacturers used to open their order books up earlier in the year like around July or so, right? Well when we had all the run-up in inflation from the commodity side a couple of years ago, they got burned pretty bad, right? We had all the surcharges and everything else. So what they’ve done is push out when they open up their books a couple of three months, okay? I mean, they take orders back of the day like in June to place an order and stuff like that and count it. But now they have pushed that out to September. So what you had was some pent-up demand, I think, some customers had already ordered for 2024, but they were not released by the OEMs, because they want to make — get more comfortable with the pricing, with their cost factors and not get burned like they did a couple of years ago, which they got pretty burn.
Let me tell you and that’s why you had to come in with all the surcharges, et cetera. So there really was — it wasn’t a September number. It may have been a little bit of a head fake, okay? When I say that because there was some pent-up demand maybe orders have been placed by in June and July, but we’re just not released by the manufacturer, because they didn’t want to open it up, because they were protecting their selves from maybe some sudden quick rise in commodity costs, et cetera. So when that 37,000 really wasn’t as big I think as people — solve. So, again, we’ve really only been working for September four weeks on business for next year. So it’s a little bit early to say, but I would have to believe that overall the market is going to be down.
