The Scoop: How 5 car companies are trying to soothe customer anxiety over auto prices

One of the most notable parts of President Donald Trump’s tariffs is on automobiles and key auto parts, such as engines and powertrain parts. Those items will all be subject to a 25% tariff — and that’s on top of proposed country-by-country tariffs. Many automakers have announced short-term pauses on price hikes, but in the long-term, the anticipated price spike is sure to give car shoppers sticker shock.

But companies are working hard to explain to customers how they’re dealing with the tariffs and what they’re doing to mitigate those cost increases.

ABC News spoke with executives from five car companies — ranging from middle-of-the-road Hyundai, Nissan and Kia to luxurious Maserati and Bentley.

Here are the key tactics we’re seeing from their statements.

Emphasize domestic production

While both Hyundai and Nissan are foreign companies, both have invested heavily in American production over the years. They both stressed this in their statements.

“The Rogue is currently built at the Smyrna Assembly Plant in Tennessee as well as in Japan,” said Vinay Shahani, senior vice president of U.S. marketing and sales, Nissan Americas. “Now we’re saying we’re going to increase the production of the Rogue in the U.S because it makes sense to do that and we can dial up production to deliver more U.S.-built Rogues. We’re also looking at subsequent new vehicles that we’re going to launch and saying, how can we optimize our footprint and bring as much as we can to the U.S.? It’s already happening — we’re moving production of the Rogue from Japan. The supply and manufacturing teams are already all over it.”

Similarly, Hyundai talked up its plants in Alabama and Georgia, along with a commitment to a steel plant in Louisiana.

Hope for a deal

Those companies that don’t already have extensive American manufacturing seemed to put most of their faith in the potential for a deal that might mitigate some of the tariff cost increases, while also acknowledging just how uncertain the situation is.

“We live day by day. We keep monitoring,” said Andrea Soria, general manager, Maserati North America. “We are currently not shipping cars from Italy. It’s a very fluid situation. Every day you have different news. If nothing changes we will need to make some decision. We cannot absorb the tariffs entirely. We hope there will be some negotiation coming, some solution, something that will be a little bit more reasonable.”

Bentley said that so far, its customers seem accepting that they’ll have to absorb the cost — something you might be able to rely on with a luxury brand, but that is far from a given for customers with tighter budgets.

Throw up your hands

Kia seemed the most exasperated by the situation, discussing at length just how difficult it would be to ramp up production in the United States in the near future.

“To build a factory takes years of planning and execution,” said Steven Center, chief operating officer, Kia America. “It’s very difficult to find a location for an auto plant. You need a lot of space, you need suppliers nearby, you need railheads to bring in the materials. Most importantly you need a labor pool. And this country is in a state of zero unemployment. So where are you going to find people?”

These are all true statements, certainly, but do they help customers now?

Whether you’re in the automotive industry or another, these three tactics can provide a blueprint for your own response. Which do you think is most effective?

Editor’s Top Reads

• Pope Francis I has died at the age of 88. The leader of more than 1 billion Catholics leaves behind a legacy of progressivism and advocating for the poor. “His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of His Church,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, camerlengo of the Catholic Church, in a statement. “He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized.” This death raises several issues communicators should be aware of. First, Catholic employees may be in a state of mourning or need time off work to attend to religious duties surrounding the pope’s death, a situation that needs to be handled with understanding. And second, the pope is not just a religious leader — he’s also a world leader, as the head of the Vatican. His death is yet another destabilizing event in a year rife with them. Whoever the new pope is will bring changes to the world landscape — and communicators will have to find ways to adapt.
• The head of the prestigious and influential Columbia Journalism Review has been fired — and has subsequently started a public campaign defending himself. Sewell Chan, who led CJR since September, was fired after what he described as “pointed interactions with staff.” While Columbia University and CJR gave only boilerplate statements that said Chan was “no longer with” the organization effectively immediately, Chan sent a four-part statement on X detailing each of the “pointed interactions” and defending himself against the firing. “In a precarious and declining news industry that has lost economic, political, social and even moral capital, the only thing I have as a journalist is my reputation,” Chan wrote. “I intend to defend it.” CJR declined comment, citing personnel issues. This is yet another controversy for Columbia, and as is common in such situations, their ability to speak publicly about the firing is limited by legal needs — while Chan’s is not. Whether Chan is over-explaining publicly will be for his next employers to decide.
• Meta’s antitrust trial is yielding an unusual treasure trove of documents that reveal the social giant’s thinking throughout critical points in its history. In April 2022, Mark Zuckerberg, worried about Facebook’s declining social relevance and userbase, sent a series of emails that have now become part of the public record. Zuckerberg floated a number of plans to boost use — including the audacious ideas of getting rid of Friends or keeping the feature but deleting all existing Friends and forcing users to start over. “This obviously carries the risk that if we did that then a lot of people just wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would become less engaged … I think we’d need to do something relatively extreme like this to move the needle though and I don’t think small things like spring cleaning flows would move the needle,” Zuckerberg wrote. The first reminder here is that anything in writing can become part of a court case. The second is that you’re only renting land on any social platform. They can entirely change the game at any time. While Facebook didn’t go through with this extreme idea, it certainly could — and in the process, upend social media entirely.

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.