Domestically built cars are up $1,600 to $2,000, not just imports

The number that undercuts the assumption that tariffs are an “imported cars” problem comes straight from Cox Automotive’s own pricing data, reported by Kelley Blue Book: vehicles assembled inside the United States have still risen $1,600 to $2,000 in price because of tariffs, even though they never crossed a border as finished cars. The reason, according to that same reporting, is “tariffs on supply imports, such as steel and aluminum” — the raw materials, stampings, and components that go into a car built in Kentucky or Ohio are still subject to the same import duties as a finished vehicle, so the cost shows up on the sticker no matter where the final assembly line sits.

Imported vehicles are absorbing far more, but nobody is exempt

For vehicles imported as finished products, the same Cox Automotive analysis found price increases of $5,000 to $8,900 per vehicle — roughly three to five times the hit domestic models are taking. Layered on top of standard auto tariffs, steel and aluminum imports currently face a baseline duty as high as 50%, a rate that a proposed U.S.-Canada trade deal would have cut to 25% before those talks broke down entirely, according to Kelley Blue Book’s reporting on the collapsed negotiations. Even the automakers most insulated from import tariffs on finished vehicles are still buying steel coils and aluminum sheet at those elevated, tariff-protected prices.

 

The industry-wide total is already in the tens of billions

Cox Automotive’s tracking puts the first-year hit to the industry at roughly $30 billion in added costs, translating to an average retail-price increase of 10.4% across the measured 2025-to-2026 model-year comparison. Consumers haven’t absorbed the full amount, though — over the 37-week period Cox Automotive tracked, actual transaction prices rose about 5.9%, with dealers eating roughly 4.5 percentage points of the increase through discounting rather than passing every dollar to buyers. That gap matters, because it means the sticker-price impact of steel and aluminum tariffs is currently being partly masked by dealer margin compression, not eliminated — a cushion that depends on dealers being willing and able to keep absorbing costs indefinitely.

Automakers have already felt this in ways that go beyond pricing

The scale of tariff exposure automakers are managing shows up in places besides window stickers. Ford, GM, and Stellantis together received refunds of between $467 million and $1.3 billion each in recent months, per Kelley Blue Book’s reporting, after a court found a prior round of tariffs had been applied unlawfully — money that had already been paid into the system and factored into the companies’ cost structure before being clawed back. That kind of after-the-fact reversal illustrates how volatile the input has become for an industry that has to set prices and order steel months before it knows what the final duty will be.

The 2025 rate hike changed the math for everyone

This isn’t the same tariff regime that first put steel and aluminum duties on the table back in 2018. The rate that’s now sitting at a baseline of up to 50%, per Kelley Blue Book’s coverage of the stalled Canada negotiations, is roughly double where broad steel tariffs started, and it applies regardless of whether the finished product ever touches a port of entry. A stamping plant in Michigan buying domestic steel doesn’t pay an import duty directly, but it’s still paying a price that domestic steelmakers have pushed upward because their import-based competition just got taxed out of being cheaper. That’s the mechanism that turns a tariff aimed at foreign steel into a cost increase for a truck that never left Ohio.

The pattern that should worry every new-car shopper

None of this is confined to the badge on the hood or the “Made in” sticker on the door jamb. A steel and aluminum tariff taxes a raw material, and raw materials flow into every vehicle regardless of where the final bolts get torqued, which is exactly why a Kentucky-built truck and a German-built sedan both show up more expensive than they were a year ago, just by different amounts. Shoppers hunting for a tariff-proof new car by sticking to “American-made” nameplates are chasing a distinction that no longer insulates them from the bill.