President Trump wants Americans to buy fewer European cars and Europeans to buy more American cars. To accelerate his pipe dream, he said on Sunday evening that new rates for EU companies 'would certainly happen'. (Those he has announced on Mexico and Canada have remained for the time being.) His threat of 25 percent rates before, including car -imports from the EU could cause a car -trading war.
The market reaction to this was predictable: the shares of the European Automaker fell yesterday. Stellantis and Volkswagen fell 6.8 and 5.6 percent respectively. Volvo fell by 6.5 percent, while Mercedes Benz, BMW and Porsche lost between 3.6 and 4.3 percent.
Despite his Bavarian descent, Trump has a special beef with German cars. In a report from 2018 from the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron that he no longer wanted Mercedes to roll that ended the Fifth Avenue of New York. And according to various public European and American diplomats, Trump also asked Macron why So Germans buy so few Chevrolets, but American drivers choose BMWs.
The accuracy of this conversation was confirmed in November when former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Italian news exit Corriere della Sera that Trump was “obsessed with the idea that there were too many German cars in New York.” Trump may have been among them, because the European cars apparently contain a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, Lamborghini Diablo and Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.
It is a strange obsession because a Mercedes-Benz rolled up by Trump will probably have been made in Alabama. There are also Mammoet BMW and Volkswagen factories in the US, building large custom cars on us.
Trump has demanded that overseas car companies must now be manufactured in the United States, apparently not aware of the fact that since the 1990s millions of cars have been made in America – mainly German.
Volkswagen said last year that it is investing $ 10 billion in the US, divided between his Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory and a joint venture with EV Maker Rivian. South Carolina has the largest BMW assembly factory in the world – it made 396,000 cars there last year – and has been so successful in more than 30 years that BMW's worldwide CEO, Oliver Zipse, recently received an economic prize from the Republican governor of the stands.
Porsche and Daimler also build vehicles in the US. German car factories in Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and other states for Trump voices work directly in the service of around 50,000 American employees, with even more employers, dealers and service centers.
“To make some distinction between what an American car is and what a German car is, is nonsense,” says Jacob Kirkegaard, a European trade expert at Washington, DC -based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
There is also an increased international arrival of car recovery. Chrysler, historically one of the big three American car manufacturers next to GM and Ford, was purchased by Fiat van Italy and has been part of the Amsterdam head office Stellantis Group, who owns RAM Trucks since 2021.
