There's a wait list of 8 months to receive new semi-trucks as manufacturers work through a massive backlog of 300,000 orders

Bob Riha Jr./Reuters

Trucking manufactures are still catching up to orders.

• As the trucking industry comes down from one of the biggest boom years ever, there's still a massive backlog of semi-truck orders.
• The backlog totals around 300,000.
• That is more than three times the normal rate.

A semi-truck normally just takes 10 weeks to produce.

But now, companies are waiting seven to eight months for their new truck, said Michael DiCecco, who is 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, consumer products ranging from the price for Amazon Prime to Hasbro toys to Tyson Foods meat crept up to make up for the skyrocketing cost of freight.

Read more: Household staples from Hershey's chocolate to Crest toothpaste will get more expensive next year, and executives are partially blaming the 'overrun' trucking industry

Now, the freight market is slowing down, trucking analysts told Business Insider. Steve Tam, vice president of ACT Research, said order numbers for December 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 around six months in August. Then it expanded to a surprising nine months in Q3 2018. Now, as companies have caught up to orders, it's back to around 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 around 300,000 trucks right now. Usually, it's around 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.