Drew Dowdell

Not content with a trade war just with China, Donald Trump has opened a second front in what is slowly turning into a trade world war. Yesterday evening, Trump announced that beginning June 10th a 5% tariff would be slapped on all Mexican products coming into the country. That tariff would increase to 10% by July 1st and then go to its 25% maximum in October. For automakers with razor thin margins, there is absolute certainty that the American consumer will end up paying these tariffs. The White House said in a statement: Goods from Mexico account for 13.6 percent of all imported goods to the U.S, totaling about $346.5 billion. Automobiles and their components are high on the list of goods that are imported from Mexico. Further complicating matters is that components can move over the border up to 20 times before reaching their final assembly location. General Motors and other domestic manufacturers are going to be hit especially hard. GM imported 811,000 vehicles from Mexico last year. One of their recent vehicles, the Chevrolet Blazer, caused a stir for being Mexican built when it was put on display at Comerica Park in Detroit at a time when GM was closing five U.S. manufacturing facilities. General Motors eventually took the display down and replaced it with a US built Traverse. Stocks fell sharply Friday morning in response to the tariff announcement.

Infiniti had moved to Hong Kong in 2012 in order to better break into the Chinese market, however, Chinese market growth has been slow for the brand over the last seven years. Sales are less than 1/10th what Cadillac sells in China. While the headquarters for the brand resided in Hong Kong, most of the development work on the vehicles themselves remained in Japan. Now, Infiniti is consolidating back to Japan in order to regain efficiencies of working closer to home. Infiniti is working on becoming an EV focused brand by 2021 with every future model featuring some level of electrification or being a pure EV. One other area that will also see consolidation is platforms. Infiniti will use more Nissan platforms in future in order to spread the development costs over more vehicles. The current Hong Kong headquarters employes about 180 people. Most of those will be relocating Yokohama or receive some sort of severance.

The Sedan Apocalypse continues. Jaguar has confirmed via a spokesperson that the current Jaguar XJ will end production this summer. However, that is just one of the big cat's nine lives. Rumor has it that the XJ nameplate will rise again on a new car, possibly a large hatchback, driven entirely by electric power. From Jaguar itself, they said: So whatever happens, the XJ is not totally dead yet. The XJ had its best sales in 1986, with over 19,000 XJs sold in the US. The current car started life in 2009, giving it a good 10-year run, however, sales of the XJ lately have been pretty poor with only 1,579 units being moved last year. Related: