Audi Says Everything’s Fine If You Ignore The Tariffs

Good morning! It’s Monday, May 5, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at Audi hiding U.S. tariffs behind a curtain, as well as Tesla’s nosediving sales in Spain. We’ll also check out the effects of the newly-instated auto parts tariffs, and what United Airlines is doing to annoy Andy specifically. 

Automakers have been shredding their financial estimates for 2025 left and right, but Audi is different. Audi has complete and utter faith in its 2025 guidance, a financial document laying out expectations for the year to investors — so long as you don’t look too close at those tariffs behind the curtain. It’s fine, actually, if you don’t think about those. From Reuters:

Volkswagen’s premium brand Audi on Monday kept its full-year guidance, with the caveat that any impact from U.S. tariffs was not included, after its first-quarter revenue rose 12.4% on higher sales of electric models.

…

“Financial implications of import tariffs, particularly in the United States, cannot be conclusively assessed,” Audi said, adding that implications of a March agreement between Audi’s management and the works council were also not yet taken into account in the guidance.

Audi, which has no factories in the United States, confirmed it would decide this year whether to set up production capacity there.

I’m gonna start making cash offers on apartments for sale, telling sellers that my finances totally check out so long as no one investigates my bank account. Surely this will go well for me. 

Everybody’s getting pretty fed up with Elon Musk’s general assaults on human decency, and it’s led plenty of folks to stop buying his cars. This has been particularly big in Europe, where Tesla has seen its share of new sales absolutely crater. For example, the company’s sales in Spain dropped 36% from April of 2024 to April 2025. From Reuters:

Tesla’s new car sales in Spain fell 36% in April from the same month in 2024 to 571 vehicles, registration data released by industry group ANFAC showed on Monday, while sales of electric cars from other brands soared.

Over the first four months of 2025, sales of Teslas in Spain fell 17% over the same period a year earlier, while sales of electrified vehicles, a category that includes both fully electric vehicles and hybrids, were up 54%.

Go anti-woke, go broke, I guess.

Does your car need a new radiator, or have your spark plugs gotten old and fouled? Well, you should’ve thought of that before last Friday, because now those parts are all going to cost you an extra 25% — so long as they don’t come from Canada or Mexico. From Automotive News:

Auto parts tariffs went into effect May 3, a month after the Trump administration placed levies on vehicle imports.

The 25 percent duty applies to a wide range of components that make up a significant portion of a new vehicle’s value.

…

The tariff includes a major carve-out for many parts sourced from Canada and Mexico. Components that meet the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s regional content rules will continue to cross borders tariff-free for now.

About 4 out of 5 auto parts imported to the U.S. in 2023 met those requirements, according to a 2024 report by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Luckily the don’t-call-it-NAFTA USMCA agreement alleviates the worst of the tariffs, but no one’s able to predict how long that barrier will hold. The administration has already done its best to undercut the agreement — itself drafted during the last Trump term — so it’s anyone’s guess what happens next. 

Newark Airport has been what the kids call going through it recently. It’s gotten a bit of a reputation as a place where best-laid travel plans go awry, and now United Airlines — an airline that’s long used Newark as a hub — is responding: Cutting flights through the airport to reduce strain on EWR’s beleaguered infrastructure. From the Wall Street Journal: 

United Airlines is canceling 35 daily round-trip flights from Newark, N.J., starting this weekend after a group of air-traffic controllers took leave following equipment outages.

Chief Executive Scott Kirby said Friday the decision came after Federal Aviation Administration controllers who oversee airspace surrounding Newark Liberty International Airport left their posts Monday after problems with their radar and radios. Several controllers took trauma-related leave after a similar outage last fall.

“Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” Kirby said in a message posted on United’s website.

Technology that controllers rely on to manage traffic has failed several times in the past few days. That resulted in dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delays and cancellations, and thousands of customers with disrupted travel plans.

A bit of inside baseball here: Most of the Jalopnik New York staff are loyal Delta adherents to fly through JFK or LaGuardia. Andy, for some reason, refuses to stop taking United through Newark. Maybe this’ll finally change his mind. 

It’s so funny that America took longer to send a man to space than the USSR, and then made a much less impressive flight out of it. Absolutely zero victory for Operation Paperclip here. No, yeah, America totally won the space race and didn’t just keep moving the goalposts until we found one we could hit first. 

New HEALTH? Hell yeah. That’s a good way to start the week right there.