New commercial vehicle registrations continued to see year-over-year improvement in April, with an increase of 2.8 percent from April 2009, according to Polk Commercial Vehicle Solutions. April marked the second straight month to see a year-over-year gain, which hasn't occurred since 2006.

Truck registrations landed at 27,300 units in April, an encouraging sign, according to Polk's Commercial Vehicle Market Intelligence Report. "With the reported increase in
orders, this will likely lead to an increase in new registrations over the coming months," the report said.

However, new vehicle registrations are still down 3.9 percent year-over-year when looking at the first four months of 2010.

The good news is, new registrations of Class 8 trucks were up 6.3 percent over the same four-month period of 2009.

The Polk Index of U.S. New Commercial Vehicle Activity shows that 2010 new registrations are on track to yield 346,300 units, compared to the previous estimate of 340,000 units. If the prediction holds true, then 2010 will see an increase of 7 percent over 2009.

For the first four months of 2010, Kenworth had the largest growth from 2009 at 17.5 percent, followed by Peterbilt at 16.2 percent growth and Freightliner at 11.3 percent growth over that period.

Ford remains the dominant player in the commercial vehicle market, with 29,300 new registrations in the first four months of this year.