With dealers rushing to meet sales quotas and automakers vying for “best-selling” bragging rights, December is always a good time to buy a new vehicle. This time, however, is a particularly great time to buy a pickup truck, especially from General Motors.

GM, caught with a glut of full-sized trucks -- 243,691 of them by November's end, or nearly double what it usually has -- is offering aggressive incentive packages on Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra models. According to a Bloomberg report, incentives could rise to as much as $5,000 per pickup in December, compared with less than $4,000 on Silverados last month. With an all-new Silverado launching next summer, GM is especially under the gun to whittle down inventories.

Automotive News points out that such bloated inventories recall GM’s pre-bailout days and that the automaker’s market share is at its lowest in 90 years, which is “threatening profits or spooking investors.” But GM says that its discounts are in line with those from Chrysler and Ford.

Regardless, if you’re in the market for a pickup, now is a good time to make a deal.

According to Bloomberg, GM’s truck incentives are still well below the $8,200 incentive packages Chrysler is advertising on its website for Ram pickups, and also below the $7,000 in incentives Ford is offering on its popular F-150 pickups. Nissan is also advertising incentives on its Titan pickup that can total almost $7,500.

To make GM pickups competitive with some of these offers, Peter Nesvold, an industry analyst with Jefferies & Co, told Bloomberg that Chevrolet dealers can cobble together discounts as large as $7,000 on some high-end trucks.

These incentives from the Big Three domestic automakers are still well below historic highs. Bloomberg points out that incentives on GM pickups are similar to those in December 2011, which on the Silverado were estimated at $4,500.

GM says it doesn’t want to return to its pre-bankruptcy bad habits. At the beginning of 2013, the automaker said it plans to cut production, if necessary, before going further with such incentives.

[Source: Bloomberg, Automotive News]