This administration has been horrible for the auto industry, both in the short term and the long term. I really thought it would be the opposite.

This is already happening on the ground and most people outside the industry have no idea. Entry level segments are where we conquest customers and build brand loyalty for the next twenty years. If the Civic, the Corolla, the Elantra get pushed out of the market or repriced beyond first time buyers, those customers do not move upmarket with the same brand. They either buy used, go domestic, or sit out entirely. I have watched this play out with every tariff wave since 2018. The showroom traffic impact at the entry end is immediate and it takes years to recover.

The math on this is pretty straightforward and worth actually saying out loud. A 25 percent tariff on a vehicle with a landed cost of twenty two thousand dollars adds five to six thousand dollars to the transaction price before any margin adjustment. At that point you are not competing in the same segment anymore. OEMs are not going to eat that spread on high volume low margin models. They will either pull the model, reposition it upmarket, or shift production to US facilities that do not yet exist or cannot scale fast enough to matter. The affordable end of the new car market is structurally at risk and that should concern everyone regardless of politics.

Entry level segments are where we conquest customers and build brand loyalty for the next twenty years. If the Civic, the Corolla, the Elantra get pushed out of the market or repriced beyond first time buyers, those customers do not move upmarket with the same brand. They either buy used, go domestic, or sit out entirely.