March 16, 2026 | Trump tariffs cost automakers $35B; Bosch’s Mohammad Fatouraie

Welcome to Daily Drive.

For Monday, March 16, 2026, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, Trump's tariffs have cost automakers at least $35 billion since last

year.

China Bands pop out door handles and yoke steering wheels in new EV safety rules.

And the FTC puts 97 dealership groups on notice about advertising practices.

Plus, we'll hear from Bosch's Mohammed Fatturi about how suppliers are dealing with changing

EV projections.

With this multi-lane approach or multi-energy platform, you can design a system that not

only fits into the battery electric vehicles, but also it can be fit into the plug-in hybrid

electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Trump's tariffs have racked up at least a $35 billion tab for automakers since last

year.

That's according to an automotive news analysis of financial reports.

Toyota is getting hit the hardest, facing more than $9 billion in costs through this

month.

The Detroit 3 shelled out $6.5 billion last year alone.

How much each company pays depends on where they build their cars and get their parts.

A lot of automakers ate those costs at first, but now they're passing them along to buyers.

We'll have more on this story in a minute with our own John Irwin.

China is positioning itself as the world's new EV safety cop, and given the size of its

market, the rest of the industry may have no choice but to follow along.

After deadly fires trapped people inside Xiaomi EVs when pop-out door handles lost power,

Beijing banned the sleek technology outright.

Starting in 2027, new rules also nicks yoke steering wheels and require good old-fashioned

physical buttons for turn signals and hazards.

No more hunting through touch screens.

Here's why it matters.

According to the China Passenger Car Association, China controls 68% of global EV sales.

That kind of market power means when Beijing set standards, automakers worldwide pay attention.

What happens there matters everywhere.

Europe and North America are already reviewing similar safety concerns, including Tesla's

door handles.

And the Federal Trade Commission is putting 97 dealership groups on notice about their

advertising practices.

The agency says advertised prices need to include all required fees, except for government

charges like taxes.

That means no surprise add-ons at the end of the deal.

The FTC flagged six practices it says are illegal.

Things like advertising cars that don't exist, or prices that only work if you finance through

the dealer.

Here's the catch.

The letters say the agency is concerned these groups might be breaking the rules, but hasn't

actually concluded they are, and ADA says most dealers play by the rules.

And those are today's headlines.

For more on those stories, head over to AutoNews.com.

Joining me now to talk more about how much President Trump's tariffs have cost automakers

in the past year is our own John Irwin, who covers the supply chain as well as GM for

us at Automotive News.

John, welcome back to Daily Drive.

Thanks for having me on.

All right, John, $35 billion is a staggering number.

Walk us through how you arrived at that figure and what surprised you most when you dug

into these financial reports?

Yeah, basically, you know, as we're approaching the one-year anniversary in April of the auto

tariffs going into place, as well as the reciprocal tariffs that have since been struck

down by the Supreme Court, we thought it'd be a good idea to look at, you know,

to dig through financial reports and take a look at how automakers have, you know, been

faring, given all the tariff costs have been piling up for them over the past year, basically

dug through every single automakers financial reports over the past year, looking at basically

trying to, you know, tally up over the course of the past, you know, 12 to 15 months, how

much automakers have reported paying in tariffs and that $35 billion number is actually probably

a little bit higher than what we're saying with $35 billion, because when you dig through,

some automakers have basically just reported 2025 figures and have yet to break out real

numbers for this year, because, you know, the first quarter is still going on.

Maybe they've had projections, but not real numbers yet.

So we didn't include those other automakers whose financial calendars fall, you know,

into the end in March of 2026, for instance, like Toyota, they do have numbers kind of

through last year and more specific projections, just through March of this year, we ended up

including those were basically just like through March, what have automakers paid?

And that's how we ended up with this $35 billion figure varies very much by, you know,

automaker, how big of a number this is, you know, some automakers were talking like Toyota,

for instance, $9 billion or so, other automakers, smaller figures, a lot of that just depends

on how much of their vehicle lineup they're importing, how large their sales figures are,

how much of the key components that they import into the US for vehicles that they build here

imported from outside of North America, etc. These numbers range pretty significantly.

But I think what kind of, I don't know if it's a surprise per se, but I think one thing that

really was driven home for me when I was digging through these numbers was just that this is

impacting everybody, regardless of, you know, if you're based in North America, or you have,

you know, pretty significant manufacturing presence in the US, you're still because of the global

nature of the supply chain, you're still importing a lot of your parts into the US, a lot of automakers

are still building vehicles, obviously outside of the US importing them in, they're trying to,

you know, move things around where they can, but there's only so much they can do.

So at the end of the day, they're paying these tariffs and, you know, for a lot of companies,

it's well over a billion dollars that they've paid so far. And got to keep in mind too,

that last year that that's really just for a portion of the year, most of these tariffs that

they've been paying really only went into effect starting in April for vehicles and in May for parts.

So we're looking at a full year now coming ahead for tariff impacts. And we'll see,

obviously automakers have been trying to minimize the financial fallout as much as they can. But,

you know, these tariffs are going to be here to stay, it appears, at least the auto tariffs. So

we'll see what these numbers look like next year. And I'll be curious to see if the figures are

higher or lower, how automakers have maybe shifted things around to try to minimize the

impacts as best they can. Well, as you mentioned, Toyota is bearing the brunt of this with over,

gosh, $9 billion. But what is driving the disparity between Toyota and other automakers?

Yeah, I think for Toyota, a lot of it just comes down to, you know, how much of,

how many vehicles they sell in the US and how many of them are imported. They do have a very

significant presence in North America, obviously manufacturing, but a lot of the key components

for those vehicles are still sourced from Japan or elsewhere. And those parts have a tariff attached

to them. So I think it sort of reflects just the sheer size of Toyota, you know, they're selling

way more vehicles than most other automakers, importing a lot of them. And then when they're

not importing them, they're importing some key parts. So at the end of the day, that figure ends

up being, you know, pretty significant. But Toyota at the same time, you know, you could argue,

despite those high costs, you know, they've highlighted ways that they've tried to,

you know, minimize the impact that that's had on their bottom lines. That's another thing that

kind of stood out to me as I'm digging through these financial figures is that, you know, for some

automakers, especially some of the smaller or niche ones, when you dig into like an Aston Martin,

for instance, you know, they're very explicit saying, you know, we're the Aston Martin said

all sorts of debt issues for years, but they weren't able to cut into that this year because

of the tariffs that they had to pay. Whereas Toyota, you know, it seems at least not to minimize a

$9 billion tariff hit at all, but, you know, they've made some moves to, you know, try to minimize

the impact that that'll have on their bottom line. You know, we'll see coming up here, you know, the

end of their financial year is in the next couple of weeks and, you know, we'll get an earnings

report after that. But it appears like they might be able to weather that maybe a little better than

some other automakers. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's $9 billion that, you know, they could

have had elsewhere, but they had to account for, you know, just because of the, again, the global

nature of the supply chain, even if you have, you know, a lot of manufacturing facilities set up in

the US, you're still importing, especially for a company like Toyota based in Japan, you're still

importing a lot of those parts into the US. So yeah, again, this is just something that, you

know, these numbers keep adding up and at the end of the day, it's just automakers trying to figure

out how they can manage their supply chains. And a lot of those decisions can take a long time to

implement. John Rowan, always insightful, my friend. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much.

Coming up next, Muhammad Fatturi from Bosch talks about how suppliers are adapting to the

tumultuous EV market. That's next on daily drive.

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Welcome back to daily drive. I'm Kellen Walker. The policy whiplash surrounding electric vehicles

has left many suppliers scrambling. Companies tooled up and invested based

on EV projections that ultimately didn't materialize creating financial pressure across the industry.

But some companies are able to navigate through the situation better than others

with help from deeper pockets and more diverse portfolios.

Muhammad Fatturi is director of the engineering and power solutions division at Bosch. He joined

her own Molly Boygon on the latest episode of the automotive news shift podcast. Here's a piece

of that conversation. It's been a very tumultuous couple of years up and down the automotive value

chain, including different companies adapting to the changing projections around EV adoption.

So companies like Bosch tooled up and invested based on EV projections that ultimately didn't

materialize. So how is Bosch dealing right now with the financial pressure of having made those

investments now that the volumes haven't materialized? Of course, yes. As you mentioned, it has been

some tumultuous years coming from the COVID disruptions into the supply chain and the geopolitical

topics in Europe. Now we have some of the more immediate geopolitical topics in the Middle

East and it's all coming at the same time. What is important for us at Bosch is that we always have

the technology neutral multi-path approach when we are developing, deploying both in terms of the

technology development as well as deployment of the investments for industrialization of those

developed technologies. We work very closely with our OEM partners as well as forecasting

the technological trends of the future and we reflect these forecasts in the decisions that

we are making for product development as well as the industrialization. As you mentioned, the

take rate of the battery electric vehicles in the market were not as expected by the industry,

but this was also a trend that we had in our scenario planning. So we had other plans based

on the approaches that we had to be able to shift our product portfolio as well as our

investments commensurate to the needs that we have from the market. Can you talk a little bit more

about that scenario planning? Is that typical for different technology trends you're identifying?

It sounds like you had different potential scenarios that you were planning for. Can you

just explain a little bit more how that works? Yeah, so very specifically for the powertrain

types that we are discussing, we have scenario planning that takes into consideration

multiple factors coming from the consumer, coming from the regulatory perspective,

economic development as well as technology development that we have. And those scenarios

are being updated regularly. This used to be annual, but now it's even more frequent scenarios

that we have. And it has to be very clear. These are not forecasts or predictions. These are rather

scenarios based on very concrete assumptions that we put behind these scenarios. Therefore,

when we are making decisions, we are making the decisions based on the realization of those

assumptions that we had for those scenarios. And that brings us a little bit more flexibility

to shift from a scenario to another. How many scenarios is it typically? Are you able to say?

I won't go to the details, but it is mainly three main scenarios, but there are some,

let's say, sub-scenarios of those or variants of those scenarios.

Okay, got it. So let's say you have, you've created this set of assumptions, as you said,

that's governing three scenarios. And one of them, at a certain point, appears to be the most

likely to materialize. Does that then impact your design of a particular component? Or what

happens once you realize one of the scenarios is appearing to take precedence over the others?

Yeah, so exactly as you mentioned, as we discussed these scenarios, then the next level would be

the trickling down of these scenarios into different divisions and different business units

that are impacted or the scenarios are reflecting their product portfolio. This goes into the

some of the development of the variants or sometimes new platform developments

that would be making the scenarios achievable. So this goes along the lines of both technology

side. And then in parallel to that, we have our business scenarios that are going with the

technology scenarios. At the end of the day, just having the technology is not important.

You need to have a business case. You need to have an industrialization solution or plan for

that scenario. And all in all, across the divisions with the different business units,

we basically go through the process. I know this is sort of a technical question,

but I wonder if you may be able to try to explain how you design a component when it's going to be

powertrain, agnostic or multi-energy platform. Where does the common layer begin and end as far as

that goes? Very good question. And that's the reason that I'm here. I'm responsible for systems

engineering. And in order to have a multi-energy platform, as you mentioned, you need to have

a good understanding of the whole vehicle system. And vehicle system can extend beyond just the

component or the subsystem that we are supplying to the vehicle. It can include the vehicle itself,

or even beyond the vehicle when you're talking about connected vehicles and all of that. It also

has the interface with the rest of the infrastructure, being the charging or the cloud infrastructure.

Depending on the sub-project, this system view is a little bit different. Let's be specific

about powertrain. What we look, of course, you have the technology pillars from classical ICE

towards the hybrids, plug-in hybrids, range extender EVs, and electric vehicles.

Not all of the components of these vehicles are unique, but there are some systems that are or

historically has been designed bespoke to these powertrains. An example that I can mention is,

for example, the thermal management is a big point for the battery electric vehicles.

One of the pain points of battery electric vehicles historically, and I can say it as a

bev driver for the past five plus years, is living in Michigan when you have a whatever 12 degree

winter day outside and you're commuting to work, the range suffers significantly.

This has been part of the technology development, of course at Bosch, but also OEMs and the other

supplier partners of the OEMs. The question now here is that, are you designing a system

that is bespoke that only can satisfy and be retrofitted into the battery electric vehicle

platforms or with this multi-lane approach or multi-energy platform, you can design a system

that not only fits into the batteries, battery electric vehicles, but also it can be fit into

the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles. This would mean that you really

need to go at the vehicle level and have from the onset a system design that is capable of this

adjustments and retrofitted into the packaging envelopes, into the technical requirements,

as well as the performance requirements that is significantly different between these platforms.

Mohamed Fatturi of Bosch spoke with our own Mali Boygan. You can hear the full conversation

on the latest episode of the Automotive News Shift Podcast, available now wherever you get

your podcasts. That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News

executive producer Jake Neer as well as our own John Irwin, Yang Jian and John Hutter for their

reporting for today's podcast. You can get the latest news on suppliers, tariff costs,

and everything happening in the auto industry at AutoNews.com. Come back tomorrow for a

conversation with Ronald Kliwick about how the Iran war is disrupting automotive supply chains.

We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show and the topics we cover today.

Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com or leave us a voicemail

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March 16, 2026 | Trump tariffs cost automakers $35B; Bosch’s Mohammad Fatouraie

About this episode

Trump tariffs

pop-out door handles

EV safety rules

yoke steering wheels

Bosch

plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

multi-energy platform

battery electric vehicles

Toyota

Detroit 3

physical buttons for turn signals and hazards

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dealership advertising regulations

reciprocal tariffs

manufacturing presence

global supply chain

imported vehicles

financial fallout

Aston Martin

EV adoption

technology neutral multi-path approach

OEM partners

thermal management

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