Yahoo Autos Say Auf Wiedersehen to a Number of Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz Models?
President Donald Trump is reportedly mulling an end to the importation of German luxury vehicles to the United States. His primary target is Mercedes-Benz, according to the German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche (Economic Week).
The publication cites U.S. and European diplomats who maintain that Trump told French president Emmanuel Macron during an April meeting in Washington, D.C., that he “would maintain his trade policy until no Mercedes models rolled on Fifth Avenue.”
This news comes nearly a week after the U.S. Department of Commerce was directed to begin investigating whether imported cars and trucks pose a threat to national security. This marks the first step by the administration to impose tariffs on foreign-built automobiles.
“There is evidence suggesting that, for decades, imports from abroad have eroded our domestic auto industry,” Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement released by the government agency. The Trump administration, according to the German publication, “threatens” to place tariffs of up to 25 percent on imported passenger vehicles, which would almost certainly lead to higher transaction prices of affected models.
Mercedes-Benz, of course, produces vehicles in the United States as well as importing them. The company has been manufacturing its vehicles in the United States since 1997, when its plant in Alabama started production of the M-class SUV. The German automaker states that it has invested more than $6 billion in its Alabama facility, which produces nearly 300,000 vehicles per year that are sold to U.S. buyers as well as exported to 135 markets worldwide.
Trump’s disdain for foreign automakers is nothing new, with the German news magazine Der Spiegel reporting a year ago that the U.S. president told European Union leaders in Brussels that the “Germans are bad, very bad.”
“See the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this,” Trump reportedly added.
Trump has also targeted non-German foreign automakers such as Toyota. In January 2017, he tweeted that if the Japanese company were to build a new plant in Mexico, it would be faced with a “big border tax.”
Like Mercedes-Benz, most foreign-brand automakers are not exclusively importers. BMW, Toyota, and several other foreign automakers all build large numbers of new cars and trucks in the United States. The products are sold here and abroad.
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