Peter Lyon
January 30, 2025
With the mountain load of executive orders signed over the last 10 days that have overwhelmed the media, and the public, Donald Trump, depending on your political persuasion, is either a Messiah or a Moron. After immediately turning to the issues of border security and J6 insurrectionists’ commutations, he will very soon direct his pitchfork in the direction of the automotive industry, which he is poised to significantly upend.
Without a doubt, he will be kind towards local bigwigs General Motors and Ford and other carmakers who build locally and employ American workers. After threatening a range of tariffs, just how he will treat foreign firms is impossible to predict.
However, if Chinese and other Asian firms don’t manufacture cars on the American mainland with American workers who pay their taxes to the American government, they can look forward to a face full of tariffs. This may be unwelcome news for companies like BYD, which does not have a production plant in the U.S. but does manufacture buses in California. The news though, is not so bad for carmakers like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and other Asian companies that do build locally.
The Germans are a different kettle of fish. Even though BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen manufacture cars in the president’s backyard, he doesn’t like the fact that so many of his countryman and countrywomen gobble up their expensive, luxurious machines like there’s no tomorrow.
Now to Britain’s car industry. It seems to phase Trump on two fronts. Firstly, the Brits have no car-building facilities inside his home base and secondly, many luxury marques like Range Rover, Rolls Royce, and Jaguar are purchased by well-to-do Americans which in his world, translates to his country people not supporting U.S. manufacturing and local jobs. So, if we are reading the Trump correctly, these foreigners will have to fork up big bucks in tariffs to get their pricey mobiles into America.
He has proposed a 100 per cent tariff on all imported vehicles, but for some foreign factories, a figure anywhere between “200 or 400” per cent was blurted to Fox News. So only time will tell.
As is well documented—even with Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk hanging around a lot—Trump is not a big fan of electric vehicles. Surprisingly though, sales of these cars have skyrocketed in the lead-up to the commencement of his second term. Why is this? He is strongly expected to dispense with the $7,500 EV incentive, which has prompted a bunch of buyers to take the opportunity to grab and EV before the government subsidy dies.
As we are seeing though, a bigger proportion of motorists are sticking with gasoline powered cars which will benefit from his controversial plan to “drill baby drill.”
CARLIST THOUGHTS
Just how far he will go with the threat of tariffs we cannot say just yet, but if his first 10 days are any indication of his resolve, then we can expect a few more sharpy pen autographs on executive orders around February 1 imposing tariffs starting from 25% and beyond.
