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Ford (F) and General Motors (GM) reported first quarter sales figures just before US President Donald Trump's auto tariffs take effect on Wednesday's so-called "Liberation Day." Barron's associate editor, Al Root, sits down with Josh Lipton to take a closer look at the US automaker's sales and discuss the impact of Trump's tariffs.
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Tesla showing its sales are continuing to slide in Europe. Registration data in key European regions fell in March and for the first quarter. The EV maker seeing declines in sales for France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. As for the United States though, Ford reporting a decline in US vehicle sales even with continued growth with its F-Series truck. Meanwhile, GM reporting double-digit increase across all four of its brands. However, this all comes, of course, ahead of the looming auto tariffs expected to take effect this week on April 3rd. Let's start with Ford and GM now. If you could share your take, what do you make of those numbers? What do you make of what they said? And also, what do you make of sort of the investor reaction?
Uh, Ford numbers were good. Yeah. Uh, General Motors numbers were good. A couple of things. Remember these are wholesale. Um, so, you know, Ford truck sales jumped 25%, but that's to the dealers. You know, retail sales were up about 5%. Again, a very good result for Ford. General Motors, you saw 17. That's a very good result. Um, if you look at the reactions, it sort of, it doesn't matter because this is the first quarter, there's no tariffs. Some of that could be pre-buying from the dealers trying to get ahead of any price increases. Um, and with uh
It doesn't matter. I mean, you mean it doesn't matter because investors are looking through that right now? No. So, if you look since the election, Ford is down about 5% coming into today. General Motors is down about 12%. Tariffs dominate. Um, uh, nobody's cut their earnings estimates on Wall Street. They're just sort of waiting for guidance from the companies when they report first quarter results in a couple of weeks. So, you know, these are nice results and it's good to see demand in Q1, but, like, to your earlier point, demand in Q1, what does it mean when prices go up when tariffs start to impact? Uh, what do dealers do? What do incentives look like? Uh, so nobody knows. So it's like, "Hey, way to go, guys, you sold a lot of cars, but now we have to wait to see what the rest of year looks like."
Listen, can I just can I dig into Ford for one second? We were talking off camera about this. The F-Series. It was up what was it up? Like almost 25%? What was that about? 25. Almost half or 25.
So, again, wholesale versus retail. Yeah. Um, so normally
Is that also is that just Americans love their trucks though? Is that what I'm saying?
Oh, so F-Series still best selling truck in uh America for 40 plus years. It actually lost its best-selling car title to the RAV4 last year. But that's okay. We'll try and get it back. So, oh, I mean, um, you know, uh, 15% of all the cars sold in America are are sort of heavy duty trucks. Right? So Americans do love trucks and this is what they're good at. This is what they make a lot of money on. Uh, so those cars are made in America, but still about F-Series made in the U.S. But still 50% of the parts come from Canada, Mexico, and overseas. So they still see an impact. Um, so, you know, it's the the quarter to quarter fluctuations are about dealer inventories, you know, what dealers think about tariffs and trying to get any price increases. Uh, so Americans love trucks. Excellent result for Ford. Excellent result for Q1 earnings, but uh these things will just sort of normalize.
