00:00 Speaker A
President Donald Trump set to unveil, as we were just discussing, new tariffs on auto imports in the next hour. Shares of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, they are all lower on that news. Our next guest is reporting that leaders at GM and Ford have been in ongoing talks with the administration to try and strike an 11th-hour deal. Joining us now is Jamie Butters, Detroit Free Press automotive reporter. Jamie, it is great to have you on the show. So, you know, Jamie, I don’t know if you heard. I was just talking to to Julie there. Obviously, the headline of the day: Trump expected to announce these tariffs on the auto industry. But we are left with so many questions, Jamie, right? We don’t have a lot of a lot of details at all right now about the level and scope of the tariffs, about whether they were carve-outs, about even the timeline here. But you know these names, Jamie. You know this sector. So, I’m curious. Just broad take, your reaction to these headlines.
01:43 Jamie Butters
Well, that’s exactly accurate that there’s still a lot of uncertainty, and as a result, many of the companies are paralyzed in terms of what they can do in terms of product planning, um, parts shipments, everything along those lines until they get some clarity. And to your point, will we get clarity or won’t we? How specific will whatever is announced at 4 or 4:30 today be in terms of allowing these auto companies to make plans going forward? Will we know exactly where the tariffs are going to be applied, where they won’t be applied, how long they’ll be in place, when they go in place? All those questions. Hopefully, we will get some answers because until that happens, so many suppliers tell me that they’ve had product plans frozen from the automakers and from their clients because they just can’t make plans till they know what it’s going to cost them.
03:27 Speaker A
And as you reported, um, Ford exec chair Bill Ford may be heading to Washington at some point this week to have some discussions with the White House. Uh, GM CEO Mary Barra attempting to get a channel there as well. You know, what what are you hearing that their message might be? It short of avoiding all tariffs entirely, what are they trying to sort of nudge the administration then in the direction of of doing, if if not exempting them entirely? What would be another sort of better case scenario?
04:35 Jamie Butters
My understanding is the conversation has centered around finding ways to mitigate whatever impact those tariffs might have on these companies. So, for example, if there might be some way around it for, um, automakers to get maybe credits or something like that, um, if they have a certain number of, uh, employees in in the United States or something. Um, any any kind of suggestions or anything that they can do to try and, um, just thwart some of the impact that the tariffs would have on their companies. Then I, from what I understand, um, at least with Ford and GM, that there’s a willingness there to relocate whatever product they can to the United States. They already have a number of facilities and manufacturing in the US. So, building new plants is very expensive. It takes a long time. It can’t happen in the next year. It can’t happen in the next two years. It would take several years and several billions of dollars to do that. And the administration just doesn’t seem to have the patience for that at the moment. And I think some of that may be the holdup.