The Latest Cost Of Tariffs: American Auto Jobs

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, May 7, 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 the knock-on effects of tariffs, as well as Tesla’s ever-spiraling sales figures. We’ll also take a look at BMW’s optimistic tariff outlook, and how your next dealership visit may not even involve a human salesperson.

America’s shiny new auto tariffs are meant to bring car-making back to the United States. One might think that such a move would benefit autoworkers like those in Volvo’s South Carolina plant, but one would apparently be wrong — the company is cutting 5% of its workforce at that plant in response to tariffs. From Reuters:

Volvo Cars said on Wednesday it would make production changes and cut 5% of the workforce at its Charleston plant in the United States due to changing market conditions and evolving trade policies, including tariffs.

A spokesperson for Volvo Cars said the changes would affect about 125 of the 2,500 employees at its factory in South Carolina.

Volvo has said that it still has plans to expand operations at the Charleston plant, adding more jobs in the process, but it’s worth remembering that the company is owned by a Chinese firm. It may be costing Volvo a pretty penny to get parts — if it can get them at all, with how little shipping is going through our ports.

Tesla is spiraling around the world, and China is no exception. The company has struggled for some time now to compete with fresher, more recently-updated EVs from Chinese competitors, but new data shows that every car that leaves Tesla’s Shanghai plant is being hit — sales from the factory are down globally. From Reuters:

Tesla’s China-made electric vehicle sales fell 6% in April from a year earlier, extending declines for a seventh month, as the U.S. automaker grapples with intense competition from its Chinese rivals and a tarnished image in Europe.

Deliveries of China-made Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, which account for exports to markets including Europe as well as China sales, totalled 58,459 units last month, down 25.8% from March, data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) showed on Wednesday.

This will be a very interesting number to watch going forward, as American tariffs force Chinese automakers to reconsider where we rank in their priorities. Of course, Tesla’s data will likely be skewed by the whole Elon Musk of it all, but still. Chinese EV sales in Europe may well go up in the coming months. 

BMW is another foreign automaker with a heavy South Carolinan manufacturing presence, so one might expect the company to shift more U.S. production to its Spartanburg facilities in order to dodge tariffs. One would once again be wrong, however, because BMW has a different take on tariffs: They’re not here to stay. From Reuters:

BMW expects U.S. car tariffs to decline from July, based on its contacts with U.S. officials, a more upbeat assessment of the trade situation than many rivals and leading the German luxury automaker to confirm its 2025 outlook.

The company warned, however, that tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump would have a “notable” impact on its second-quarter results. Executives declined to estimate that hit during a call with analysts on Wednesday.

It’s no secret that the United States government has been reaching out to foreign parties through back channels to negotiate deals outside of the tariffs, so it’s possible that’s what BMW is referring to here — that tariffs will be reduced on BMW specifically, through some art of the deal, rather than an overall reduction in import taxes. Who’s to say, though. 

Is going to a dealership just too easy? Too painless? What if instead of a human being, your salesperson was an AI made out of digital translation tools that was constantly hallucinating specs and deals that aren’t real? Would that be better? Dealers seem to think so, according to Automotive News:

Avatars are not yet part of the retail automotive landscape, but [Mo] Zahabi [assistant vice president of product consulting for Cox Automotive] and Cox Automotive are exploring whether they soon could be. Avatars could be relatively simple, valuable tools to help dealerships run their operations more efficiently. Managers or dealer principals might facilitate service training or personalize a customer’s car-buying experience, for example, by sending avatar-driven messages of themselves at crucial stages of the process.

Avatars have come a long way from the blue-skinned aliens in James Cameron’s 2009 film and its sequels. Companies including Aragon, Picsart and Synthesia (which Zahabi uses) are able to generate video avatars for personal or professional use. The process is simple, Zahabi said.

“Avatars are just visual AI,” Zahabi said. “What they do with an avatar is they basically record a human [saying] different things. Essentially, I could create a clone of somebody like I did with myself, clone the voice, combine them and then have it communicate via a script.”

It’s once again worth noting that large-language models, the stuff we know as generative AI, cannot “know” a fact. It’s not that they can’t distinguish fact from fiction, but that the idea of “truth” is simply not a part of their programming — they’re a slightly more advanced version of mashing the next predicted word on your iPhone keyboard. I’m looking forward to a slew of false advertising suits when these AI avatars start selling people on features that the cars they’re discussing don’t actually have. 

As an aside, does Automotive News think the word “avatar” only dates back to the James Cameron flick? Not, like, its roots in Sanskrit as a Hindu belief? Not its initial use to mean a digital persona back in the ’70s, or the popularization of that usage in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” in the ’90s? We’re going Jimmy Cameron on this one?

I still think of DaimlerChrysler sometimes. I can’t really say why, the word just pops into my head on occasion and generally won’t leave for a couple hours. This happens with Mariska Hargitay’s name too. 

I think RAT WARS may firmly be my current favorite HEALTH album, taking over from DEATH MAGIC. Good band.