The general manager of a car dealership in Dartmouth, N.S., says he expects the price of new vehicles to increase in less than 90 days as a result of an ongoing trade war with the United States.
On Thursday, a 25 per cent tariff went into effect on all foreign-made vehicles and auto parts entering the United States. In response, Canada imposed a counter-tariff of 25 per cent on all non-Canadian content of American vehicles arriving from south of the border, along with any American cars not compliant with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico (CUSMA) free-trade agreement.
“There’s no economist in the world that doesn’t know that input costs are going up. And the automobile business is a big ticket, small margin business. There’s no choice but to have a price increase in all manufacturers,” Andrew MacPhee said during an interview with Global News on Friday.
Get daily National news
He said that 75 per cent of the cars in his MacPhee Ford showroom are manufactured south of the border — but most vehicle parts come from within Canada — leaving retailers in disarray when calculating the impact.
“When you get parts, and parts of vehicles, manufactured in other parts of the world and assembled in the United States, what does that mean?”
MacPhee says it won’t be long before his showroom vehicles are impacted by tariffs.
Barish Akyurek, Vice President of Insights Intelligence at Autotrader.ca, says many buyers are shifting to the used car market to avoid paying higher costs — but that demand is beginning to have an opposite effect.
‘This shift because of these tariff expectations, there’s been quite a bit of activity, sales activity in the market, both for new and used, and used car prices have started to increase already in March,” he explained.
For more on this story, watch the video above.
Comments