Author: John Mayhead
Tariffs are a very hot topic at the moment. Whatever today’s rate emerging from the White House may be, the impact on the world’s automotive industry could be great, especially in Mexico and Canada which share borders with the USA across which cars often move many times during construction. Press attention has tended to focus on these imports and exports, but the number of cars arriving and departing by sea into the US isn’t insignificant and also worthy of analysis, as is the overall size of the UK car industry.
According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the UK produced 761,598 cars in the year to February 2025, of which around 83 percent were exported. That sounds big, but it’s around 4.5 times smaller than Germany, the EU’s automotive powerhouse, that builds around 3.4M car per year. It has been dropping in recent years, too: UK production has roughly halved since February 2019 and domestic production was down by a third in the last 12 months.
America is the destination for just under 17 percent of UK automotive exports, around 105,000 cars per year, and the average value per car is high: around £79,000 compared with the German export mean of about £39,700. When Hagerty tracked which new cars were shipped from the UK into the US in 2024, four premium manufacturers account for over 22,000 (nearly one quarter) of them: Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce and McLaren. The latter shipped 1132 cars in 2024, of its published 4863 global production figures. UK automotive exports may be relatively small, but they are high value and not insignificant.
When shipping data for older cars is analysed, it’s clear that the flow of cars in and out of America are two very different markets. The February 2025 12-month average imports of all cars over three years old into the USA by ship totalled 2334 cars and the sources are dominated by the big industrial nations of Japan, Germany, South Korea and the UK, plus a significant number shipped internally from other ports in the US. Many of these are true classics: 90 percent of all Japanese imports and 82 percent of UK imports were over 25 years old.
Contrast this with car exports: the same 12-month average for February 2025 records 60,444 +3-year-old cars shipped out from the US, with the top five destinations being Georgia, the UAE, Lithuania, Nigeria and Libya. Just 1248 were over 25 years old of which the most, 166, went to Germany.
These charts tell a story: high-quality cars, both new and classic, in to the US from other large economies; ‘second-hand’ cheap cars shipped out to smaller nations that may have more evolving economies. The result of the tariffs may be to change this balance; I’ll return to this story in a few months once the impact is felt.
Will the tariffs affect how you purchase cars? We would love to hear from you at hdc@hagerty.co.uk