Trump To Scale Back Auto Tariffs

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, April 29, 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 Trump’s plans to mitigate the effects of his own tariffs, as well as the group of automakers that’s trying to strip California of its special emissions rules. We’ll also look at how GM expects to fare in this new tariff world, as well as how Porsche expects to make its money. 

The Trump tariffs have thrown much of the economic world into chaos, from the biggest of automakers to the smallest of Temu impulse shoppers. Unfortunately for the Temu buyers, though, only the former is getting any kind of tariff relief. A new plan from the Trump administration promises to remove the doubling of tariffs for automakers, meaning they’ll pay the import tax or the tax on supplies like steel and aluminum, but not both. From Reuters:

President Donald Trump’s administration will move to reduce the impact of his automotive tariffs on Tuesday by alleviating some duties imposed on foreign parts in domestically manufactured cars and keeping tariffs on cars made abroad from piling on top of other ones, officials said.

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The move to soften the effects of auto levies is the latest by his administration to show some flexibility on tariffs, which have sown turmoil in financial markets, created uncertainty for businesses and sparked fears of a sharp economic slowdown.

Honestly, at this point, who even knows what the administration will do next. It’s possible that Trump advisors will slowly chip away at the tariffs, but it’s equally possible that Trump himself will come out on Truth Social later today and yell about how this tariff relief is fake news. I’m so glad I don’t have to run a multinational business in this regulatory environment, I’ll tell you that much. 

California decided to ban sales of new gas vehicles by 2035, and a number of other states signed on to join in the ban. This was all allowed by a waiver from the federal government during the Biden administration — a waiver that automakers now want Congress to revoke. They’ve banded together to form a lobbying group called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, with the primary goal of not innovating on EVs and continuing to sell gas cars until climate change kills us all. From the Detroit Free Press:

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote later this week on legislation to repeal a waiver granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under former President Joe Biden in December allowing California to mandate at least 80% emissions-free vehicles by 2035.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents the Detroit Three automakers, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai and other auto manufacturers, said in a letter to each member of the U.S. House of Representatives that the car companies could soon be “forced to substantially reduce the number of overall vehicles for sale to inflate their proportion of electric vehicles sales.”

You see that hazy photo above? That’s pre-CARB California. That’s LA smog, and it’s why California gets to set its own emissions standards. If you don’t think automakers would bring this back to make an extra buck, you have far too much faith in your local multinational corporation. 

When you’re a big company, you issue something called a “guidance.” It’s a very rough estimate of the returns you expect to give shareholders over the course of a set period of time — a year, a quarter, whatever — and investors will use that to decide whether or not to invest. GM’s guidance for 2025, according to the company, is now completely out the window thanks to tariffs and economic uncertainty. From Automotive News:

The automaker on April 29 said net income fell to $2.8 billion in the quarter ended March 31, while revenue rose 2.3 percent to $44.02 billion. GM CFO Paul Jacobson said the quarterly results were hampered, in part, by lower wholesale volumes of highly profitable full-size pickups and SUVs resulting from several weeks of scheduled assembly downtime and a fire that affected a supplier.

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GM no longer has confidence in its 2025 guidance issued in January, before the tariffs on imported vehicles began, Jacobson said. The automaker previously forecast net income of $11.2 billion to $12.5 billion and adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of $13.7 billion to $15.7 billion, but had said the outlook assumed stability in North American policy.

Like I said: I don’t envy the people running big multinational corporations right now. How do you plan for the future when it’s in such a constant state of flux? 

Porsche had high hopes for 2025, but that was before the tariffs hit. Now the automaker has cut its profit projections by nearly half, thanks to uncertainty around tariffs as well as the future of the EV market. From Bloomberg:

Porsche AG expects its profit margin to slip into single digits this year, with the luxury-car maker warning about US tariffs and higher costs from weak electric-vehicle adoption.

The German manufacturer now projects return on sales to fall to as low as 6.5%, down from previous guidance of at least 10%. Porsche is one of the carmakers most exposed to President Donald Trump’s trade moves because it lacks a factory in the US.

Republicans in Congress have already mused about not only eliminating the EV tax rebate, but actually adding extra fees to the sales of EVs. This is sort of hilariously regressive on its face, considering how we all stand to die in natural disasters if we keep driving gas cars around forever. But no, sure, make the slightest mitigating measure against global catastrophe, a measure that’s already struggling in the Marketplace Of Ideas, more expensive. Surely this’ll work. 

I think they might have been wrong.

I have a sore throat, and I’m sleeping on the couch so as not to expose any of my roommates to me. This is coming directly after a weekend of sleeping on a couch for a wedding. I miss beds.