AD #3980 - Trump Tariffs To Push Car Prices Up $10,000; VW Could Build Audis, Porsches In U.S.; Tesla Uses FSD To Move Cars To Shipping Dock
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Speaker 1: This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry. Shawn's out at a media event
today and I'm filling in for him, and we start out the show today with the auto industry incomplete turmoil over President Trump's threat to slap twenty five percent tariffs on imported cars. While most of the focus has been
on Mexico and Canada, the tariffs will likely go on all imported vehicles, and the Europeans in particular are really nervous.
Oliver Zipsa, the CEO of BMW, says the European Union should cut the tariffs on cars imported from the US from the current ten percent rate down to two and a half percent, which is what the US tariff on European cars is. Ola Collenius, the CEO of Mercedes Benz,
says the EU should reach a grand bargain with the Trump administration to avoid a trade war. Meanwhile, to avoid
paying tariffs, is reportedly looking into building Audis and Porsches at its assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has excess capacity.
The new Scout plant that's getting built in South Carolina could also be used to make audis, but let's not fool ourselves. Even though this is physically possible, it would
definitely drive up overall costs for VW, Audi and Porsche.
And as a side note to this, Volkswagon officially canceled plants to sell the ID seven electric sedan in the US and Canada. Dealers worried that the price would be
too high and the volume would be too low. Though
VW never announced pricing. For North America, the ID seven
sells for about fifty five thousand dollars in Europe. General
Motors is also feeling the Trump tariff pain. Even though
GM's earnings report yesterday beat Wall Street expectations, its stock price took ann nosedive, largely because GM did not provide any guidance on how the tariffs will impact the company and what it will do about it. Of course, you
really can't blame GM too much. Nobody really knows what's
going to happen or when, and while GM is undoubtedly wargaming all kinds of scenarios, you don't want to publicly say what you're going to do until you know what you're going to do. But here's one company that knows
exactly what it's going to do. Jerome Dorlacht, the CEO
of Addion, the seat supplier, says there's no way it's going to eat the cost of those tariffs. He's warning
automakers that he'll pass that cost directly onto them. Dorlac says,
Addiot is in constant contact with the CHIRA companies over this issue, sometimes on an hourly basis. Trump is supposedly
going to announce the tariffs this Saturday. If that happens,
watch for car prices to go up significantly. Even if
the tariffs are phased in over a number of months, the impact will be immediate. Think about it. The average
price of a car today is nearly fifty thousand dollars.
That's the retail price. Let's say that the factory price
is forty thousand dollars before shipping costs and dealer markup.
A twenty five percent tariff on the factory price would boost the cost of that car by ten thousand dollars.
And that kind of price increase we'll push tens of thousands of consumers out of the market, especially those with low credit scores who will no longer qualify for a loan or a lease.
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Speaker 1: We reported a couple of weeks ago so that Shohn Duffy would be the new Secretary of Transportation in the US, and yesterday the Senate made it official. It voted seventy
seven to twenty two in favor of appointing him, and mister Doffy didn't waste any time. He immediately signed an
order directing regulators to rescind the Biden administration's fuel economy standard of fifty point four miles per gallon by twenty thirty one. The standard is currently at thirty nine point
one MPGs. It'll probably hover there for the rest of
the Trump administration, and the California Air Resources Board sees the riding on the wall. The carb just withdrew its
request to the EPA to set tougher emission rules for heavy duty trucks and to force trucking companies to buy more fully electric trucks. However, California still has a rule
in place that forces manufacturers to sell a growing number of zero emission trucks each year. So truck makers are
forcing their dealers to sell a certain number of electric trucks in order to meet those standards, and if the dealers don't hit that goal, the manufacturers will not ship diesel trucks to them, and this could wreak havoc on the California heavy truck market. And yet, despite all the
worries of the Trump tariffs, they haven't hit yet and for the moment, SNP Global says new car sales look pretty good. For January. It predicts that US customers will
buy one point one million vehicles this month. That's up
about seven and a half percent from last year. That
puts the SAR at sixteen point two million vehicles for the year, which is a decent number, but at still a million vehicles less than what sales were pre COVID.
SNP Global also says BEVs should hit nine percent market share, which is also decent, but it could also turn out that people are just rushing out to buy new cars now before the tariffs hit, and rushing out to buy evvs before that seven five hundred dollars subsidy goes away.
Honda says it achieved a breakthrough in quantum materials that could make sending communications more secure. Scientists at the Honda
Research Institute USA developed the new method to create what they call a nano ribbon. It's a material that's just
a single atom thick and only tens of atoms in width.
When it's excited by a laser, the nano ribbon material emits a light that can carry encoded information to create what they call a physical layer of quantum secure communication that can immediately detect any attempt to intercept that communication. Ie,
they can tell if anyone's trying to hack it. It's
all pretty technical, but if you're interested in more details, we've got a link to that in the transcript or the description box. And for the last segment in today's show,
Tesla is showing off the capabilities of its autonomous technology at its Freedmont plant in California. The company posted two
videos on x that show Model threes and wy's driving themselves without a human aboard around the factory. The vehicles
navigate a one point two mile route from the factory to the loading docks, where they're then loaded onto trucks to head out for delivery. Tesla didn't reveal any other
details other than what you can see in the video, but in the post it didn't say this brings it one step closer to large scale unsupervised FSD. And that's
a wrapp Thanks for watching Outline Daily and if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or a sign up for the daily newsletter on our website.
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