trump tariffs

Trump’s trade and environment policies are a disaster for carmakers

Cars, EV adoption, trump tariffs / Beth Washington / August 6, 2025

General Motors blamed Trump’s tariffs for costing it $1.1 billion in Q2 and as much as $5 billion by the end of the year. And while the new anti-EV adoption policies are yet to fully bite, it’s clear they’ve motivated some action inside the GM boardroom. Although GM CEO Mary Barra wrote to investors that the company believes “the long-term future is profitable electric vehicle production,” she followed by explaining that GM’s flexible factories will help it succeed in a world where EPA fuel economy targets are no longer a thing. That’s probably why GM added 300,000 more units of capacity for “high margin light-duty pickups, full-size SUVs and crossovers.”

Ford said that the tariffs could cost it as much as $2 billion this year, despite it making more actual vehicles in the US than any other automaker. That’s because it has to pay the US government to import raw materials like steel and aluminum, as well as components and subassemblies.

Foreign automakers are also feeling the effects, given the importance—until now, at least—of the US car buyer. Stellantis, which owns the Jeep and Ram brands, said it had already lost $2.7 billion this year due to tariffs, although the automaker stands to benefit in the coming years from the gutting of fleet fuel efficiency fines.

Aston Martin may benefit from a lower 10 percent tariff for UK-made cars, but it described the process as “extremely disruptive,” and although it has now restarted shipping cars to America, it issued a profit warning last week.

BMW is among the less badly hurt; although its operating margin fell to 5.4 percent, this was within its expectations. Mercedes had to warn investors to expect less this year, and it says the US will become a less-important market for the company, which plans to make up for it with growth in China. Volkswagen Group said the tariffs have cost it $1.5 billion so far this year, and it has also revised down its forecasts for the rest of the year.

Although Porsche announced record deliveries in North America just a week ago, its operating profit was a third of that a year ago. “In the US, import tariffs are also putting huge pressure on our business. Looking ahead, the movement of the dollar could also have an impact. In addition, the transformation to electric mobility is progressing more slowly than expected overall, with consequences for the supplier network,” said Porsche and VW Group CEO Oliver Blume.

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Trump suspends trade loophole for cheap online retailers globally

Amazon, de minimis, Donald Trump, e-commerce, Policy, shein, tariffs, temu, trump tariffs, us-china trade war / Mike M. / July 31, 2025

But even Amazon may struggle to shift its supply chain as the de minimis exemption is eliminated for all countries. In February, the e-commerce giant “projected lower-than-expected sales and operating income for its first quarter,” which it partly attributed to “unpredictability in the economy.” A DataWeave study concluded at the end of June that “US prices for China-made goods on Amazon” were rising “faster than inflation,” Reuters reported, likely due to “cost shocks” currently “rippling through the retail supply chain.” Other non-Chinese firms likely impacted by this week’s order include eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop, and Walmart.

Amazon did not respond to Ars’ request to comment but told Reuters last month that “it has not seen the average prices of products change up or down appreciably outside of typical fluctuations.”

Trump plans to permanently close loophole in 2027

Trump has called the de minimis exemption a “big scam,” claiming that it’s a “catastrophic loophole” used to “evade tariffs and funnel deadly synthetic opioids as well as other unsafe or below-market products that harm American workers and businesses into the United States.”

To address what Trump has deemed “national emergencies” hurting American trade and public health, he has urgently moved to suspend the loophole now and plans to permanently end it worldwide by July 1, 2027.

American travelers will still be able to “bring back up to $200 in personal items” and receive “bona fide gifts valued at $100 or less” duty-free, but a fixed tariff rate of between $80 to $200 per item will be applied to many direct-to-consumer shipments until Trump finishes negotiating trade deals with the rest of America’s key trade partners. As each deal is theoretically closed, any shipments will be taxed according to tariff rates of their country of origin. (Those negotiations are supposed to conclude by tomorrow, but so far, Trump has only struck deals with the European Union, Japan, and South Korea.)

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Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war

AI, AI chips, Donald Trump, frontier ai, h20 chips, Howard Lutnick, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, Policy, semiconductors, tariffs, trump tariffs, us-china trade war / 9u50fv / July 29, 2025

But experts seem to fear that Trump isn’t paying enough attention to how exports of US technology could threaten to not only supercharge China’s military and AI capabilities but also drain supplies that US firms need to keep the US at the forefront of AI innovation.

“More chips for China means fewer chips for the US,” experts said, noting that “China’s biggest tech firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba,” have spent $16 billion on bulk-ordered H20 chips over the past year.

Meanwhile, “projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips,” experts said. If Trump doesn’t intervene, one of America’s biggest AI rivals could even end up driving up costs of AI chips for US firms, they warned.

“We urge you to reverse course,” the letter concluded. “This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security.”

Trump says he never heard of Nvidia before

Perhaps the bigger problem for Trump, national security experts suggest, would be if China or other trade partners perceive the US resolve to wield export controls as a foreign policy tool to be “weakened” by Trump reversing course on H20 controls.

They suggested that Trump caving on H20 controls could even “embolden China to seek additional access concessions” at a time when some analysts suggest that China may already have an upper hand in trade negotiations.

The US and China are largely expected to extend a 90-day truce following recent talks in Stockholm, Reuters reported. Anonymous sources told the South China Morning Post that the US may have already agreed to not impose any new tariffs or otherwise ratchet up the trade war during that truce, but that remains unconfirmed, as Trump continues to warn that chip tariffs are coming soon.

Trump has recently claimed that he thinks he may be close to cementing a deal with China, but it appears likely that talks will continue well into the fall. A meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping probably won’t be scheduled until late October or early November, Reuters reported.

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Trump cuts tariff on UK cars; American carmakers not happy about it

Cars, trump tariffs / 9u50fv / May 9, 2025

The British car industry got a big break from US President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon. Trump and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer have agreed to a bilateral trade agreement that cuts tariffs on a range of imports from the UK, including pharmaceuticals, aluminum and steel, and cars.

Now, the first 100,000 cars that come to the US from the UK will only be subject to a 10 percent tariff rather than the 27.5 percent they have been under since the start of this trade war in April.

“The car industry is vital to the UK’s economic prosperity, sustaining 250,000 jobs,” said Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell. “We warmly welcome this deal which secures greater certainty for our sector and the communities it supports. We would like to thank the UK and US Governments for agreeing this deal at pace and look forward to continued engagement over the coming months,” Mardell said.

As it turns out, 100,000 is almost as many cars as the UK exported to the US last year—about 102,000 last year. Not every car that wears a British brand’s name is made there, but Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover, McLaren, Mini, and Rolls-Royce all manufacture cars in the UK.

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Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts

console gaming, Game prices, gaming, Moore's Law, Tech, trump tariffs / Beth Washington / May 4, 2025

Consider the PlayStation 2. Not all of the PS2 Slim’s streamlining came from chip improvements—it also shed a full-sized 3.5-inch hard drive bay and a little-used IEEE 1394 port, and initially required an external power brick. But shrinking and consolidating the console’s CPU, GPU, memory, and other components took the console from its original design in 2000, to the Slim in 2004, to an even lighter and lower-power version of the Slim that returned to using an internal power supply without increasing the size of the console at all.

Over that same span, the console’s price dropped frequently and significantly, from $299 at launch to just $129 by 2006 (the price was lowered again to $99 in 2009, deep into the PS3 era).

Or look at Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Its external design didn’t change as much over the years—the mid-generation “slim” refresh was actually only a little smaller than the original. But between late 2005 and early 2010, the CPU, GPU, and the GPU’s high-speed eDRAM memory chip went from being built on a 90 nm process, to 80 nm, to 65 nm, and finally to a single 45 nm chip that combined the CPU and GPU into one.

Over that time, the system’s power supply fell from 203 W to 133 W, and the base price fell from $300 to $200. The mid-generation 65nm refresh also substantially fixed the early consoles’ endemic “red ring of death” issue, which was caused in part by the heat that the older, larger chips generated.

As you can see when comparing these various consoles’ external and internal design revisions, shrinking the chips had a cascade of other beneficial and cost-lowering effects: smaller power supplies, smaller enclosures that use less metal and plastic, smaller heatsinks and cooling assemblies, and smaller and less complicated motherboard designs.

Sony’s original PS2 on the left, and the PS2 Slim revision on the right. Sony jettisoned a few things to make the console smaller, but chip improvements were also instrumental. Credit: Evan Amos

A slowdown of that progression was already evident when we hit the PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch generation, but technological improvements and pricing reductions still followed familiar patterns. Both the mid-generation PS4 Slim and Xbox One S used a 16 nm processor instead of the original consoles’ 28 nm version, and each also had its price cut by $100 over its lifetime (comparing the Kinect-less Xbox One variant, and excluding the digital-only $249 Xbox One). The Switch’s single die shrink, from 20nm to 16nm, didn’t come with a price cut, but it did improve battery life and help to enable the cheaper Switch Lite variant.

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Trump backs down a bit on auto industry tariffs—but only a bit

Cars, trump tariffs / Kelly Newman / April 29, 2025

President Donald Trump is set to ease up slightly on the automotive industry this week. After being warned that his trade war will result in hiked prices and fewer vehicles being built, government officials over the past two days have signaled that Trump will sign an executive order today that will mitigate some of the pain the 25 percent import tariffs will inflict.

Trump’s approach to tariffs has been nothing if not inconsistent. In this case, the White House is not dropping the 25 percent tariff on all imported vehicles, but the other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration—like the 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum that went into effect in February—won’t stack up on top.

The potential for multiple tariffs to have an additive effect on prices could have seen new car prices soar in the coming weeks; now, they are likely to just rise a lot instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, the move will be retroactive, and automakers who have (for example) paid aluminum or steel tariffs on top of the car import tariff can seek a refund for the former.

A separate 25 percent tariff on imported car parts is set to go into effect on Saturday. These are still planned to go into effect, but importers will be able to apply for small reimbursements—up to 3.75 percent of the value of a US-made car for a year, then 2.5 percent of the car’s value for the second year.

How easy the government will make the reimbursement process, and where that money will come from, has yet to be made clear.

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Framework “temporarily pausing” some laptop sales because of new tariffs

AMD, framework, framework laptop 13, intel, tariffs, Tech, trump tariffs / Kelly Newman / April 8, 2025

Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be “temporarily pausing US sales” on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework’s online store for now, and there’s no word on when buyers can expect them to come back.

“We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent,” the company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales. “At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss.”

“Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it,” Framework said. Nintendo also paused US preorders for its upcoming Switch 2 console last week after the tariffs were announced.

For right now, Framework’s sales pause affects at least two specific laptop configurations: the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H and AMD Ryzen 5 7640U versions of the Framework Laptop 13. As of April 1, Framework was selling pre-built versions of those laptops for $999 and $899, respectively. Without those options, the cheapest versions of those laptops start at $1,399 and $1,499.

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Not just Switch 2: ESA warns Trump’s tariffs will hurt the entire game industry

Entertainment Software Association, gaming, trump tariffs / Kelly Newman / April 5, 2025

This morning’s announcement that Nintendo is delaying US preorders for the Switch 2 immediately increased the salience of President Trump’s proposed wide-reaching import tariffs for millions of American Nintendo fans. Additionally, the Entertainment Software Association—a lobbying group that represents the game industry’s interests in Washington—is warning that the effects of Trump’s tariffs on the gaming world won’t stop with Nintendo.

“There are so many devices we play video games on,” ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo’s preorder delay news broke. “There are other consoles… VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it’s just the Switch, then we aren’t taking it seriously.

“This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry,” she continued. “There’s going to be an impact on the entire industry.”

While Trump’s tariff proposal includes a 10 percent tax on imports from pretty much every country, it also includes a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam and a 54 percent total tariff on China, the two countries where most console hardware is produced. Quinn told IGN that it’s “hard to imagine a world where tariffs like these don’t impact pricing” for those consoles.

More than that, though, Quinn warns that massive tariffs would tamp down overall consumer spending, which would have knock-on effects for game industry revenues, employment, and research and development investment.

“Video game consoles are sold under tight margins in order to reduce the barrier to entry for consumers,” the ESA notes in its issue page on tariffs. “Tariffs mean that the additional costs would be passed along to consumers, resulting in a ripple effect of harm for the industry and the jobs it generates and supports.

Not just a foreign problem

The negative impacts wouldn’t be limited to foreign companies like Nintendo, Quinn warned, because “even American-based companies, they’re getting products that need to cross into American borders to make those consoles, to make those games. And so there’s going to be a real impact regardless of company.”

Not just Switch 2: ESA warns Trump’s tariffs will hurt the entire game industry Read More »

Trump on car tariffs: “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices”

Cars, trump tariffs / Kelly Newman / March 31, 2025

However, those claims were directly contradicted by Trump this weekend.

“No, I never said that. I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars,” Trump told an NBC interviewer.

“The message is congratulations, if you make your car in the United States, you’re going to make a lot of money. If you don’t, you’re going to have to probably come to the United States, because if you make your car in the United States, there is no tariff,” Trump said, apparently unaware that even the Teslas built by his benefactor Elon Musk in Texas and California contain a significant percentage of parts made in Mexico and Canada, parts that will cost 25 percent more as of next month.

Trump also told NBC that his tariffs will be permanent, although in the past we have seen the president flip-flop on such matters. Analysts are still trying to reach consensus on how much the Trump tariff will add to the prices of domestic and imported cars, but expect prices to rise by thousands of dollars as automakers and dealerships try to preserve some of their profit margins.

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