US President wants with new tariffs Donald Trump (78) The EU get to open up to US car brands. However, experts contradict: Commercial barriers or tariffs are not to blame for the weak performance of the US carmakers in Europe, but their models.
“This is the big problem of the US manufacturers that the tastes of European consumers simply not hit,” says industry expert Stefan Bratzel from the Center of Automotive Management in Bergisch Gladbach. “They actually have nothing to offer that could gain larger market share.”
The only exception is Tesla,, adds Bratzel. “But Tesla now has other problems.” In the first quarter the sales of the e-car manufacturer was sagged by 13 percent. The reason should also be growing criticism of Tesla boss and Trump consultant Elon Musk (50).
Trump accuses EU unfair competition
Trump had justified the additional tariffs that had been in force since Thursday to import cars with the fact that Europe isolate itself too much. “One of the reasons why I introduce tariffs is that we take millions of their cars – BMW,, Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz“, Said the 78-year-old. At the same time, it was“ almost impossible ”to run US cars into the EU.
The numbers initially seem to agree with Trump: While almost 450,000 cars last year Germany in the USA It was only 136,000 in the opposite direction, reports the VDA industry association. And while the United States has only raised 2.5 percent inches on cars from Europe before the introduction of the 25 percent surcharge, the EU’s sentence for US vehicles is 10 percent.
US cars too big for Europe
But that is not the reason for the imbalance, says industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer. “The cars from America are simply unsalable for us.” They are too big for Europe, the gasoline consumption is far too high in the face of the local fuel prices. “You can’t sell a car with eight cylinders and 15 liters of consumption.” In the United States, this is not a problem in view of the petrol prices there, in Europe.
The US model, which has been sold for years, the pick-up truck Ford F-150, is therefore not officially offered in Europe, just as little as the competitive model of the Stelltis brand RAM. On the other hand, the US manufacturers would not have competitive small and compact cars.
“If you want to sell cars here, you need models that customers want,” says Dudenhöffer. So far, the US manufacturers have not succeeded. According to Dudenhöffer, tariffs could not change anything about that.