Trump Wants Even More Car Tariffs

Happy Friday! It’s June 13, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re looking at the President’s consideration of new, higher tariffs on cars, as well as the NHTSA’s desire for more AVs testing on our roads. We’ll also look at which singular EV brand’s cratering has dragged down EV sales nationwide — you’ll never guess which it is — and Tesla’s new, higher prices. 

We may be collectively stuck with smog-spewing ICE engines for the foreseeable future, but Americans can rest easy knowing that the fumes we’ll all choke on come from American engines — built by American hands, in American factories. To ensure this reality comes to pass, President Trump is considering raising the auto tariffs that have already impacted car prices across the country. From Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump said he may raise US auto tariffs in order to boost domestic auto manufacturing, a move that could further ratchet up tensions with trading partners.

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The president said raising auto tariffs from their current 25% level could offer further protection for the domestic auto industry, citing General Motors Co.’s plan to invest $4 billion in US plants over the next two years in order to avoid paying duties.

“I might go up with that tariff in the not too distant future. The higher you go, the more likely it is they build a plant here,” the president said.

Trump has been negotiating deals with countries hit by the tariffs to lower their rates, so God only knows what’ll happen when the base rates rise again. Do those deals get scrapped? Do the new base rates just not affect anything? Will any of us who report on this stuff retain a single shred of sanity? Tune in two weeks from now to find out!

Plenty of companies have been testing autonomous vehicle tech on U.S. roads, often to the chagrin of human drivers forced to navigate around slow and unpredictable beta vehicles, but it turns out there’s still some restriction on the vehicles that are allowed to test: Cars without wheels or pedals, with no way for a human to sit in the driver’s seat to control them, still have to pass government muster before they can hit the streets. So, of course, the NHTSA wants to change that. From Reuters:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday said it was streamlining reviews of requests filed by automakers seeking to deploy self-driving vehicles without required human controls like steering wheels, brake pedals or mirrors.

NHTSA has authority to grant petitions to allow up to 2,500 vehicles per manufacturer yearly to operate on U.S. roads without required human controls but the agency has spent years reviewing several exemption petitions without taking action.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the exemption process has been “bogging developers down in unnecessary red tape that makes it impossible to keep pace with the latest technologies.”

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Manufacturers must demonstrate vehicles without human controls provide an equivalent safety level and exemptions are in the public interest.

We’ve seen in recent years that self-driving tech is, at a very basic level, not ready for the big time. This attitude that government cannot get in the way of industry, cannot regulate new tech, is fundamentally backwards — without government to protect us from whatever new thing businesses want to try, we’d all still have sawdust in our bread, lead in our paint, and radium in our wristwatches. 

EV sales dropped in the U.S. for April, despite gains from many of the EV makers in the country. If more brands are selling more cars, how did the market as a whole drop? Well, the unassailable sales leader for EVs in the U.S. is Tesla, which has been absolutely cratering in recent months. From Automotive News:

New U.S. electric vehicle registrations fell in April for the first time in 14 months as consumers remained cool to the technology despite automaker promotions and the continued availability of the $7,500 federal tax credit, according to S&P Global Mobility.

The 4.4 percent decline in April EV registrations, compared with the same month last year, was the first year-over-year drop since February 2024, S&P Global Mobility said. April’s 97,833 EV registrations represented a 6.6 percent share of the light-vehicle market, a significant slide from the 7.4 percent share EVs had a year earlier.

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Tesla, the top-selling EV brand, suffered a 16 percent drop in April to 39,913 registrations, the data showed. Every Tesla vehicle lost ground in April except for its least-expensive vehicle, the Model 3 sedan.

Tesla has over four times the registrations so far in 2025 as the next best-selling EV brand in the States, so a change to Tesla means a change in the market. This is what we call a Harley-Davidson scenario. 

Tesla’s solution to these flagging sales — a phenomenon largely based in its CEO’s politics, though not unaffected by its ancient and cheap-feeling vehicles — is to give its most expensive models the mildest of refreshes. And also to raise their prices by thousands of dollars. This is true business genius right here. From Reuters:

Tesla said on Thursday it upgraded its Model S and Model X cars in the U.S. and raised their prices by $5,000, according to the electric vehicle maker’s post on X and its website.

Prices were hiked for all configurations of the two models by $5,000, Tesla’s website showed.

According to Tesla’s Twitter, the updates are truly spectacular. A new color, mildly increased range, some new noise cancellation, and a couple other absolutely game-changing bits and bobs. The one update that promises to make a real difference is the claim of new, more comfortable suspension, but it remains to be seen whether that’s enough to fix Tesla’s famously harsh and bouncy rides. 

Listen, it was a good try. 

I’ve been listening to a lot of KEXP recently — today’s their summer funding drive, send a few bucks their way if you can to make up for the federal funding that’s on track to be rescinded — and yesterday the station reminded me of this absolute banger of a track that I haven’t listened to in years. Thanks, KEXP, for bringing this one back into my brain.