At a Rolls-Royce dealership in Manhattan, salesmen have been fielding calls all week from Americans who have ordered bespoke models of the British luxury vehicle and fear they could be impacted by President Trump’s 25 per cent tariff on car imports.
Dominick DiMatteo, a Rolls-Royce brand ambassador and sales consultant at Manhattan Motorcars, said: “The truth of the matter is we’re getting calls from some of our clients who have orders in. They are saying, “Hey, even though I ordered it six months ago, is it going to get hit with the 25 per cent? I don’t know the answer to that just yet”.
DiMatteo, who recently sold a Rolls-Royce Phantom, manufactured in Goodwood, West Sussex, for $774,000, said his customers include celebrities, athletes and successful business people. They are people who can absorb higher prices. However, he fears prospective customers will hold off on buying the cars on principle.
“I think what would stop someone is if they are thinking the tariff is wasted money, almost like a ransom. So that would bother them, not the price itself on it, but the question of, ‘why am I paying this extra money?’”
The president has described the new duties as “permanent”, adding that he was not interested in offering any carve-outs. The tariffs will come into force on April 3 and will initially target fully assembled vehicles.
Their scope will then expand over the following month to include car parts such as engines, transmissions, powertrain components and electrical systems
Sir Keir Starmer has so far said that while Britain would continue to negotiate with the US in the hope of blunting the impact of tariffs, he was unwilling to impose retaliatory tariffs and escalate the dispute further.
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“I think we need to keep, as ever, pragmatic and clear-eyed. We are engaged, as you know, in intense discussions with the US on economic arrangements, on a number of fronts, including to mitigate tariffs,” the prime minister said in Paris on Thursday.
“We will continue in that way because I think that, rather than jumping into a trade war, it is better pragmatically to come to an agreed way forward on this if we can.”
The US is the second biggest export market for cars produced in the UK, accounting for 16.9 per cent of exports in 2024 or about 100,000 vehicles, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the trade body.
UK passenger car exports to the US — mostly in the form of luxury and high-end cars — were worth £7.6 billion in 2024, the SMMT said.
Jaguar Land Rover, the West Midlands-based Range Rover, Defender and Jaguar group, accounts for the majority of these exports and is the automotive business most impacted by the tariffs.
In the last quarter alone, the company exported 38,000 vehicles, mainly Range Rover and Range Rover Sport from its British factories to the US and a further 39,000 from the EU where it makes the Defender in Slovakia.
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The company said: “We are waiting for further information on President Trump’s announcement, and we will make a further statement, as appropriate, in due course.”
The UK car industry as a whole appears to have increased shipments to the US following Trump’s win. Data from HMRC show that passenger car shipments from the UK to the US increased by nearly a quarter in November last year, after Trump won the election early in the month.
While the sector was alive to the prospect of the tariffs, Ineos Automative, the fledgling producer of old-school utility vehicles, criticised British and European governments for not being able to see the writing on the wall.
“This is what happens when politicians sit on their hands,” said Lynn Calder, chief executive of the vehicle business, which is an offshoot of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos industrial empire.
“As a growing EU-based automobile brand, we are vulnerable to tariffs, and we need our politicians to support our business, our jobs and our economies. We need urgent and direct political intervention on tariffs.”
A 2024 study by the US International Trade Commission predicted that a 25 per cent tariff on imports would reduce imports by almost 75 per cent, meaning that the UK’s car industry could take a significant hit from the levies.
According to separate data from the same agency, the UK was the sixth largest exporter of new passenger cars to the country last year, though its exports were dwarfed by those from manufacturing centres like Japan, Mexico and Germany.
One of the very few car companies that might benefit from the tariffs is Elon Musk’s Tesla, given its large factories in California and Texas. While Musk warned on X earlier this week that the tariffs would have a “significant” impact on the car company, its share price rose on news of the levies by 2.5 per cent.
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At the same time, the UK car industry’s position at the higher end of the car market may allow them to more easily pass on the tariffs to consumers even if they are not able to move production to the US, as the duties are intended to encourage.
However, this is of little respite to salesmen on the shop floor in the US or those producing the cars in the UK.
Jason Gorman, a Bentley sales executive in Manhattan, said: “Everyone is a little worried about the demand right now with the tariffs.”
He added that the cars, which are manufactured in Crewe and sell for between around $250,000 and $400,000 at his dealership, have already risen in price by about 12 per cent over the past two years.
Exports to the US make up nearly a third of all production, worth £650 million, at the factory of Bentley Motors, a luxury arm of Volkswagen.
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Gorman’s customers, who include “celebrities, private equity guys and traditional Bentley clients who have been driving them for 30 years”, are price-sensitive.
“The cars have gone way up in price over the last couple of years,” he said. “We’re already seeing their sensitivity to those prices, and people shopping pre-owned versus new because of it, and this is going to make things worse.”
A spokesman for Rolls-Royce, owned by BMW Group, said: “We should be discussing reducing trade barriers rather than creating more. The BMW Group remains committed to reducing tariffs and trade barriers between the EU and the USA, which would benefit consumers in both regions.
“The EU and the US are the world’s largest trading partners — which brings great responsibility to both sides. A trade conflict between these economic regions would not have any benefits. Both sides should therefore promptly find a transatlantic deal that creates growth and prevents a spiral of isolation and trade barriers.”
