Ford is as American as apple pie. Or is that Honda?

AMERICANS buying cars will very soon be liberated from even more of their money than usual. President Donald Trump’s incoming 25 per cent auto tariffs, timed to roughly coincide with his “Liberation Day” announcement of so-called reciprocal tariffs, are expected to add several thousand dollars to the average price of a vehicle in the US (not cheap as it is).

Besides the dollars involved, there is the unsettling, extreme rationale behind these tariffs with which to contend. Peter Navarro, Trump’s uber-hawk trade adviser, was asked recently about manufacturers potentially cutting jobs to deal with the costs of tariffs. His response to CNN’s Kasie Hunt was astonishing: “So the first thing it’s really important to understand, is that the ‘Big Three’ so-called American companies – GM (General Motors), Ford, Stellantis – they’re not really American companies.”

Let us concede that Stellantis, headquartered in the Netherlands, is not an American company. On the other hand, it was formed largely through Fiat’s rescue of Chrysler out of bankruptcy, and employed more than 50,000 people in the US at the end of 2023.