American Made Autos in 2016

Made in America 'Cars'
There are Only 8 for 2016

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Every year Cars.com kicks us in the teeth with what’s become automobile industry’s reality. Modern globalization trends have allowed much more maneuverability to the car manufacturers. For decades now, they’ve been able to control their gains and losses by moving parts or even entire manufacturing facilities abroad where production is usually much cheaper. Things went so far that the Congress had to pass the American Automobile Labeling Act back in 1994. The AALA defines the American-made car term. In order for it to earn the “Made in America” label, a car needs to contain at least 75% of its parts made either in the US or Canada.

So, why would the list of American-made cars be a kick in the teeth? Because there’s only 8 such cars for the 2016 model year. Before you start do despair, this is actually an improvement over the 2015 year models when there were only 7 American-made cars.Still, it’s quite a downgrade compared to previous years when there were never less than 10 vehicles with 75% domestic parts. Heck, there were almost 30 of them back in 2010.

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Not only that these eight last Mohicans are listed, but they are also rated by the number of assembly plant jobs they support. It’s easy to figure out that production drives employment, hence models produced in higher quantities support the most assembly-plant jobs. In other words, those models top the list of American-made cars.

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Assembly-plant jobs aren’t the only jobs these models drive, though. Dealers, suppliers, etc – they all benefit from car manufacturing industry, but Cars.com stops here and only takes direct employment at the assembly plant into consideration. Furthermore, they relate the employment to the sales figures instead of production numbers.

Gearheads

Cars.com

No F150, no Ford Expedition, no Dodge Ram, no Toyota Tundra? I know those plants are in the US( Ram is also in Mexico) so I guess the parts are all shipped in and merely assembled here?

Probably only talking cars there and not trucks.

theshyguy wrote:

No F150, no Ford Expedition, no Dodge Ram, no Toyota Tundra? I know those plants are in the US( Ram is also in Mexico) so I guess the parts are all shipped in and merely assembled here?

pup wrote:

Probably only talking cars there and not trucks.

All pickups fell below the 75% threshold. I forgot to add the link to the actual Cars.com article above so I just added it.

Cars.com wrote:

Five of this year's eight AMI cars are from foreign-based automakers; the last time a Detroit Three vehicle topped the AMI was in 2014, when the Ford F-150 pickup truck ranked No. 1. (This year's F-150, like many other vehicles, fell below the AMI's 75-percent eligibility threshold for domestic-parts content.)

The federal domestic content rating doesn't include point of assembly. It also doesn't include the location of the engineering and design work.

The F150 uses a body stamped and assembled in the US as well as the frame, engine and transmission. I believe the axles and transfer case is as well, but that could have changed in recent years.

toyboxrv wrote:

The federal domestic content rating doesn't include point of assembly. It also doesn't include the location of the engineering and design work.

So are you saying that if you engineer and design a product in the States, then go to China and have all the parts made, but bring all the bits and pieces back to the States to assemble it, then it's American Made?

I don't see where I said that at all. Excluding certain types of input isn't counting accurately how much is domestic.

It's about Domestic Parts Content. Engineering, design and assembly are not parts.

It's all about jobs and how much the product you buy contributes to the economy.

More specifically, the above info only cared about vehicles made with 75% American content and then graphed the # of American assembly jobs from said vehicles.

In the end, it looks like there's only about 20k US assembly-plant jobs for those 8 vehicles.