United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada and Mexico will threaten production at automakers across North America and send record vehicle prices even higher, with about a quarter of a trillion dollars in trade set to be disrupted.

Trump on Saturday followed through on his warning to impose 25 per cent tariffs on imports from the two countries, blaming the flow of migrants and drugs over the U.S. borders — as well as large trade deficits — for the move. Barring a surprise, the tariffs are set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, giving manufacturers less than 48 hours to figure out what to do.

Mexico won a temporary reprieve as of Monday morning, a little over 12 hours before the tariffs were due to start. Both Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the planned duties would be paused for a month, after Sheinbaum agreed to reinforce the border between the neighbors with Mexican soldiers. 

As the 11th-hour talks continued, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set to speak with Trump later Monday, some automakers were expecting the worst after contingency planning through the whiplash of the last few days. 

“The auto sector is going to shut down within a week,” said Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. “At 25 per cent, absolutely nobody in our business is profitable by a long shot.”

Automakers in Mexico had been preparing by preemptively importing both more components and vehicles, and are likely to continue doing so over the next month to get ahead of the new start date, said Guillermo Rosales, president of the Mexican Association of Automotive Distributors, or AMDA. Still, “uncertainty persists and that affects the Mexican economy,” he said Monday. 

The duties would immediately hit almost one quarter of the 16 million vehicles that are sold in the U.S. each year, as well as the parts and components that go into them — an import market that totaled US$225 billion in 2024, according to research from automotive consultant AlixPartners. Tariffs will add US$60 billion in costs to the industry, the research shows, much of which is likely to be passed on to consumers.

Automakers in Mexico have been preparing by preemptively importing both more components and vehicles, which may ease the blow in the first few weeks, said Guillermo Rosales, president of the Mexican Association of Automotive Distributors, or AMDA. After that, the outlook is less certain. “Everything depends on the course that the Trump administration takes in this matter,” he said.

The order “weakens the most integrated industry in North America,” Mexico’s auto associations said in a joint statement Sunday, putting “the competitiveness of North America as a whole at stake.”

While Trump’s tariffs loom large over Mexico’s auto industry, some automakers such as BMW are powering ahead. The tariffs will not affect BMW’s plans to invest 800 million euros in a new battery facility near its San Luis Potosi, Mexico, factory, which will enable local production of a next-generation EV known as the Neue Klasse by 2027, a BMW Group representative said. “The BMW Group does not base its long-term strategic decisions on politics or political incentives,” the company said.

Car components can make their way back and forth across U.S. borders as many as eight times during production, heaping duties onto a sprawling industry that relies on materials from all three countries. At the consumer end of the supply chain, the average price of a new car may climb by about US$3,000, Wolfe Research analysts have said, further straining affordability with prices already close to all-time highs.

“It is going to be a lot of impact,” Aruna Anand, chief executive officer of parts supplier Continental AG’s North American business, said in an interview. “The question is who is absorbing the price and it becomes, are we able to absorb that price or is it going to be shifted to the end consumer?”

‘Ghost town’

Since Trump renegotiated the free trade agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico during his first term, automakers in those countries have had to meet higher thresholds for parts made in North America, but trilateral trade hasn’t incurred duties. The president’s new tariffs upend the agreement, which is due to be reviewed next year.

For automaking hubs like Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, and across multiple states in Mexico, the effects are likely to be immediate.

“We’re talking about thousands and thousands of jobs being lost,” said John D’Agnolo, the president of a local union representing workers at Ford Motor Co.’s engine plant in Windsor. “We’d truly be a ghost town, here in Windsor, if we lost this type of business.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has warned that more than 500,000 jobs may be lost just in Canada’s most populous province, many of them in the auto sector.

Industry experts said that sourcing every last piece of a vehicle within the U.S. supply chain — as Trump wants — is a tough ask. On the campaign trail, Trump promised that his protectionist policies would bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., raise revenue and lower the country’s trade deficit. Analysts have warned it could take years to shift production and create new jobs.

General Motors, the largest U.S. carmaker, has said it wouldn’t move production unless the company can be sure it makes long-term sense.

“We are working across our supply chain, logistics network, and assembly plants so that we are prepared to mitigate near-term impacts,” chief executive Mary Barra told analysts on Jan. 28. “Many of these actions are no cost or low cost. What we won’t do is spend large amount of capital without clarity.”

The Detroit-based company imports its Chevrolet Equinox EV and Blazer EV from a plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, and manufactures large pickup trucks in Silao.

GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said last week that the company was taking inventory in Canada and Mexico down in anticipation of tariffs. The automaker was also expediting the shipment of those vehicles, according to a spokesman.

China imports

In Mexico, tariffs would likely reduce growth in the country’s auto-parts sector to zero this year, from a projected two per cent, said Francisco González, executive president of Mexico’s National Auto Parts Industry Association, known as INA. González noted that price increases would quickly be passed on to consumers.

“The automotive industry cannot adapt to such a decision in the short term,” he said.

One supplier said that their margins on certain parts made in Mexico were just two per cent to 10 per cent, so adding the tariff would mean an instant loss of as much as 23 per cent on each component.

Alongside Trump’s complaints about migrants and the drug trade, the president has also expressed concern that China is using Mexico as a “backdoor” to send cheap goods into the U.S. Since the U.S. election, president Claudia Sheinbaum has added tariffs of her own on cheap Asian imports and shifted focus to local manufacturing. She’s vowed to retaliate against the U.S. duties.

Gonzalez said concerns that Chinese car parts are entering the U.S. via Mexico are overblown, with less than three per cent of components sold in Mexico imported from China. Still, suppliers are working to find alternatives to Asian-made parts, he said, with low-cost components like nuts, bolts, plastics and resins, as well as some software, easiest to replace.

Mexico’s share of the U.S. car market has steadily increased over the past 40 years, overtaking Canada around the 2008 financial crisis, research from Toronto-Dominion Bank shows.

For its part, the Canadian government pledged 25 per cent tariffs against $155 billion of U.S. goods. Outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration has pushed to secure investments for electric vehicle production in Ontario’s manufacturing hubs, drawing firms like Honda Motor Co Ltd. and Volkswagen AG to pledge tens of billions of dollars to build battery and assembly plants in the region.

Canada’s auto trade relationship with the US dates back to the 1920s, when Henry Ford outsourced some manufacturing of the Ford Model T to factories on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. The country’s auto industry is still heavily concentrated in that area, where Windsor connects to Detroit via the 2.4 kilometre Ambassador Bridge.

Auto assembly in Canada has declined sharply since 2000 — in fact, most of the vehicles sold in the country are supplied by U.S. factories, and only nine per cent are Canadian-made, as measured by dollar value. But the parts-supply industry has remained relatively healthy.

About a year ago, Laval Tool, a small auto-parts manufacturer in Windsor, signed a two-year contract to supply Tesla Inc. with molds for the Cybertruck.

Many of the materials for the molds are sourced within Canada, according to Jonathon Azzopardi, Laval’s chief executive. But the steel used in his factory is imported from the U.S. That means the process, which already costs as much as US$500,000 per mold, is about to get even more expensive.

“I’ll be paying a tariff for the steel to come in from the U.S. Then I’ll be paying a tariff when the mold leaves to go back into the U.S.,” he said in an interview before final details of the duties were announced.

“It’ll make us uncompetitive and we’ll lose business.”

In early 2022, autoworkers in Windsor got a glimpse into what happens when the supply chain between the two countries is interrupted, after protesters of Canada’s COVID-19 lockdown rules blocked access to the bridge.

“Within 24 hours of parts not being able to make it across the border in either direction, car production stopped in Ontario, Michigan, Texas and Missouri,” said APMA’s Volpe.

Automakers are likely to cut production again almost immediately once tariffs are implemented, said Michael Robinet, vice president of forecast strategy for S&P Global Mobility. If they carry on making the same volume of vehicles, he said, they risk shipping them into the US to sit on forecourts while consumers try to wait out the duties.

“Automakers and suppliers would hold off on building high tariff products,” Robinet said. “We expect production and sales would go down.”

With assistance from Keith Naughton, Gabrielle Coppola, Craig Trudell and Richard Clough

Bloomberg.com