Is there even such a thing as a 'Made in America' vehicle anymore?
Peter Armstrong · CBC News · Posted: Aug 31, 2018 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 23 minutes ago
One of the most popular vehicles in the United States is a perfect example of why it would be so hard and so destructive to impose tariffs on Canadian-made cars in the name of protecting American ones.
The Toyota RAV4 — the bestselling non-truck in America — is made in Woodstock, Ont. In fact, 247,633 of them were made there last year. The process to build each one is an intricate dance of manufacturers and suppliers in multiple countries, with hundreds of trucks a day crossing borders back and forth between Canada, the United States and Mexico to deliver parts.
The engines are shipped from West Virginia and Alabama.
The transmissions are made by a supplier in North Carolina.
The seats are built in Elmira in southwestern Ontario. But that supplier brings in wire harnesses from Mexico and metal brackets from Kentucky.
The sunroof and door frames are made in Stratford, Ont., with parts coming from all over North America
. . .
She points to the American Automobile Labeling Act. Even it, the only public source of content data in the U.S., counts both American and Canadian manufacturing as "domestic."
"There is no way to tell what an American car is" she says. "Or how American your car is on any public data source available to consumers."
So, consumers can't tell where their vehicles are really made. The auto industry has spent decades making these intricate and complex supply chains more efficient. That's saved billions of dollars — savings that have been passed onto the consumer. (DesRosiers says the average cost of a car, adjusted for inflation, is about the same as it was 15 years ago.)
Undoing or even complicating that process will rattle an entire industry and add thousands of dollars to the cost of a vehicle.
Which is why DesRosiers can't understand why the Trump administration would even consider going down that path.
"You'd need an absolute idiot in Washington to do that," he says.
"Even a Grade 12 economics student could figure out this is the absolute worst thing to do for both countries."
