- Trump’s 25% auto tariffs will unleash “pure chaos,” according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, but the Trump administration argues it is rebuilding an industry the U.S. squandered over decades through the wrong trade policies.
Dan Ives already has a phrase to describe President Donald Trump’s punitive 25% duty on imported cars—he’s calling it the “tariff announcement heard around the world.”
The Wedbush Securities analyst warns no one will be spared in the coming Carmageddon, least of all Americans. By his calculations, the expected collective hit to U.S. consumers ranges on the order of $100 billion every year as automakers pass on the full brunt of the costs.
“Every automaker in the world will have to raise prices in some form selling into the U.S., and the supply-chain logistics of this tariff announcement heard around the world is hard to even put our arms around at this moment,” he wrote in a research note on Friday.
Ives estimates $5,000 to $10,000 in costs could easily be added to each car, depending on whether it’s a mass-market or premium brand. “The winner in our view from this tariff is no one,” he continued.
In a statement to Fortune, the Trump administration did not share Ives’s assessment of the car tariffs.
Instead, steep tariffs are all part of a broader America First agenda that includes policies like deregulation, cheaper and more plentiful energy, as well as tax cuts that feature a new deduction for U.S.-built cars.
Look to a patient China’s strategic approach to building its industry
The administration argues the tariffs serve a more ambitious goal: The president ultimately aims to restore an industrial base squandered over decades through the wrong trade policies that have resulted in countless U.S. factories moving offshore.
“The Trump administration is committed to delivering on this vision,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in a statement to Fortune.
The short-term hit to economic growth and inflation may be difficult to swallow in a country where investors demand steady returns every quarter. But the White House wants to instill a new approach that emulates Beijing by thinking in much longer time frames, as Trump explained recently.
It’s exactly this patience in crafting an industrial strategy over a generation that has resulted in China’s auto industry now eclipsing the West in terms of the speed of its technological innovation.
Currently, only Tesla can still withstand the new domestic competitors like BYD in the world’s largest car market. Worse, with a brutal price war now entering its third straight year, even CEO Elon Musk no longer sees the company’s future first and foremost as an automaker.
Is dominating ‘every step of the supply chain’ a fiction?
Trump wants to change all this.
“America cannot just be an assembler of foreign-made parts—we must become a manufacturing powerhouse that dominates every step of the supply chain of industries that are critical for our national security and economic interests,” Desai added.
Ives, a big believer in Tesla’s recent pivot to humanoid robots, doesn’t believe this is all that realistic, however, since even cars built in America come equipped with foreign-made parts and components that constitute 40% to 50% of their value.
That kind of reshoring is simply not cost efficient for parts with a high amount of human labor, like wire harnesses that serve as a vehicle’s electrical nervous system. Other parts, like certain high-tech semiconductors sourced from Taiwan, would need to be onshored for the very first time.
“A U.S. car with all U.S. parts made in the U.S. is a fictional tale not even possible today,” Ives wrote.
