Guess who makes cars in Mexico: Not just the three automakers Donald Trump has called out for the practice (so far), but just about every big automaker. Is Trump going to go after them all? Quite possibly.
Trump has now targeted Ford (F), General Motors (GM) and Toyota (TM) for building cars south of the border, or planning to. But those automakers aren’t unusual; they’re basically following industry practice. Here’s the full alphabetized list of automakers that build cars in Mexico for sale in the United States, with examples of the cars imported from there:
Fiat Chrysler (Dodge Journey, Fiat 500)
Ford (Fusion)
GM (Chevrolet Trax, Cadillac SRX)
Honda (Fit)
Kia (Forte)
Mazda (Mazda 2)
Nissan (Sentra, Versa)
Volkswagen (Beetle, Golf, Jetta)
And here are the carmakers planning to start producing cars in Mexico soon:
BMW (production due to begin in 2019)
Mercedes (production due to begin in 2018, in joint venture with Nissan)
Toyota (Corolla, beginning in 2019)
These two lists represent nearly every big automaker in the world, and most of them pursue the same strategy: building their lowest-margin vehicles in Mexico, to ensure the profitability of small cars they can only charge so much for. The only well-known brands not on the list are Jaguar-Land Rover, Subaru, Volvo and Hyundai, although Hyundai is the parent of Kia, which does build in Mexico.
Every one of the automakers building cars in Mexico also has US factories, except Mazda, which has less than 2% market share in the United States and might not have the scale to build cars here profitably. In general, they build higher-margin vehicles such as SUVs, pickups and large sedans in the United States, since higher prices allow them to cover the higher cost of US labor.
Many automakers also sell cars in the United States that come from other low-cost countries. Hyundai imports many vehicles built in Korea, for instance. Some models from Audi (parent company, Volkswagen) come from Hungary and Slovakia. The new Buick Envision is built in China, where Buick is a much more popular brand than it is in the United States. There’s no big automaker anymore that builds products exclusively in one country or region, from which it sells to the rest of the world.
Trump has no obvious strategy in terms of the companies he’s picking on, unless his plan is to eventually target every automaker producing in Mexico. But that would amount to more of an industrywide assault that could meet stiffer, unified resistance than if Trump attacks companies one-by-one. So he may prefer to drizzle out his attacks one tweet at a time.