EV skepticism builds amid tariff threat, headwinds

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Despite increasing competition from Chinese automakers, disappearing rebates for electric vehicles, growing unease about the economy and other headwinds, one threat above all others is rattling the auto sector: United States President Donald Trump’s potential 25 per cent tariffs.

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Ford Motor Co.’s chief executive has said they could “blow a hole” in the sector, while General Motors Co.’s chief financial officer has said permanent tariffs could force automakers to consider moving operations out of Canada and Mexico.

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Last week, after Stellantis NV — the owner of Jeep, Dodge and other brands — abruptly halted a $1.3-billion project to retool its Brampton, Ont., assembly plant, Unifor chair Layna Payne, whose union represents the largest number of Canadian auto workers, pointed to Trump’s tariff threats.

“The chaos and uncertainty plaguing the North American auto industry, which is under the constant threat of tariffs and a dismantling of EV regulations from the United States, are having real-time impacts on workers and corporate decisions,” she said in a statement.

Trump’s plans for tariffs on autos and other Canadian goods remain hazy. In February, he postponed implementing them by 30 days, which means they could come as soon as March 4. Earlier this month, he also said he would implement 25 per cent tariffs on auto imports, but did not specify if Canada would be exempted. He has also proposed 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminum, both of which are used by the auto sector, beginning March 12.

Although tariffs continue to dominate headlines, many auto executives are also working on something else: pumping the brakes on the electric vehicle (EV) transition as government investment and support policies appear to be fading away, a longer-term slowdown in projected sales and Trump’s unwinding of the EV revolution in the U.S.

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Stellantis Canada president Jeff Hines has pushed back against the notion that internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles will ever entirely disappear, despite a federal mandate in Canada that calls for 100 per cent of new auto sales to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

“I don’t see how that ever is going to be possible,” he said at the Canadian International Auto Show on Feb. 13, one week before the work stoppage in Brampton. “With the technology, certain people have to drive long distances, it’s just not going to work. The range today is not going to work for a lot of commercial customers.”

Hines also said “the cost of raw materials is still very high” for EVs, citing $15,000 to $20,000 in additional costs compared to a standard ICE vehicle.

Meanwhile, he said the disappearance of government incentives to offset the cost of EVs — at the federal level in both Canada and the U.S., where most Canadian-made vehicles are sold — as well as a lack of investment in charging infrastructure has hobbled automakers’ ability to sell EVs.

“What we really struggle with, and I think everybody in the industry struggles with, was the mandates on one side,” he said. “But if there’s not federal and provincial support to help with the transition, to put in the infrastructure that’s required, the two don’t ‘box’ because the vehicles on the electric side are just inherently today more expensive than building a traditional ICE vehicle.”

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The result is that many industry insiders now say the EV adoption targets set by the industry and government just a few years ago are too ambitious. As well, expectations about how quickly EV costs may decline and how quickly technology can improve things such as driving range need to be reset.

In Brampton, Stellantis had planned to idle its assembly plant for two years as part of a $3.6-billion overhaul of its Canadian operations that was announced in 2022. For now, the company has kept its plans and reasons for stopping work at the plant vague, saying its investment commitment remains unchanged, but that it is reassessing its product strategy in North America.

It is certainly grappling with many issues. On Wednesday, Stellantis reported a 70 per cent drop in year-over-year net profit and it continues to search for a new chief executive.

But the EV transition has long been considered the most difficult challenge for the auto sector, and it has already presented challenges and stumbling blocks.

In 2023, Stellantis marketed its Dodge Challenger and Charger cars as the “Last Call,” which many enthusiasts took to mean would be the last ICE-powered version of the muscle cars. The company has released an all-electric version of the Charger, but it is also planning to release an ICE version later this year.

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A Stellantis spokesman said the company always planned to release an ICE version of the Charger, and it designed its assembly plants in Brampton and Windsor, Ont., with flexible platforms that can switch production between battery-electric, hybrid and ICE vehicles according to market demand.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Hines said. “As things change, as things adjust, as potential policy changes, we can adjust with that as well.”

Still, the sudden work stoppage in Brampton means the plant is unlikely to start production in 2025, although the company has said it will start in 2026.

Fears that the stoppage could signal a broader sector shift directly connected to tariffs were amplified by nearly 80 layoffs a week earlier at GM’s plant in Ingersoll, Ont., where it produces the BrightDrop, an electric delivery van.

But Mike Van Boekel, union chair of the Ingersoll plant, tied the layoffs to plant efficiency rather than trade tensions with the U.S.

“There’s too many people for two shifts,” he said. “We used to have three shifts when we built our previous vehicle, the (Chevrolet) Equinox. Then, we retooled; everybody, us as well as GM, thought the BrightDrop would be three shifts. We just had too many people.”

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Yet there’s no doubt the lingering threat of U.S. tariffs continues to unnerve the sector.

“We’re still optimistic it can be a great year,” Vito Paladino, president of Audi Canada, said, “but the instability, and a lot that’s being discussed at the moment, you certainly need to monitor (because) you know geopolitics can be quite complex.”

Paladino said Audi is staying flexible by launching the “biggest product offensive we’ve ever had,” meaning it will launch many new vehicles in the next few years so it can “adapt and adjust” to market demand.

Industry insiders say there was always uncertainty about how quickly Canada should ramp up its EV supply chain, given that the majority of vehicles manufactured here are exported to the U.S., where the pace of the transition has been uncertain.

Investment began when Joe Biden was U.S. president and began speaking about the need to build out an EV supply chain as a way to create high-paying jobs, combat climate change and produce technologies that could compete with China.

Ford kicked off the EV supply chain investment in Canada in October 2020 with a $1.8-billion plan to retool its Oakville, Ont., assembly plant, backed by $590 million in provincial and government support.

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The Ontario government cast it as a historic investment that would transform the province into “a global hub” for EV battery production.

“Ford of Canada is … the first automaker in the country to build full battery-electric vehicles,” Dean Stoneley, then-president of Ford Motor Co. of Canada, Ltd., said at the time.

During the next four years, other automakers and battery companies announced an additional $46 billion of investment in Canada’s EV supply chain, backstopped by an estimated $52 billion in federal and provincial government support.

But as of late January, just a fraction of the federal government support, around $743 million, had been dispersed, according to a spokesperson for the industry minister.

More to the point, some of the planned EV supply chain projects have fallen through or been shelved, perhaps only temporarily, as a result of questions about the EV timeline.

This summer, Ford said it would produce F-Series Super Duty pickup trucks in Oakville rather than an EV as originally announced.

Meanwhile, other projects have hit snags. Belgium’s Umicore SA last year paused plans for a $2.76-billion project, backed by nearly $1 billion in government support, to build a complex that could produce the upstream building blocks for EV batteries in Loyalist Township, Ont.

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This summer, it paused construction and, in a press release earlier this month, attributed the delay to ​​”slower-than-expected growth in demand for electric vehicles.”

Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, an industry group representing auto-parts companies, said the reelection of Trump as U.S. president has injected new uncertainty into the economy that is further slowing down the EV transition.

“Trump is trying to reverse EV trends, not just abandon them,” he said. “The U.S. president backing out of EVs and EV support at a moment when we’re past the tipping point, how do you model the costs of that?”

Trump has said he plans to roll back parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature bill that spurred hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in a U.S. EV supply chain.

In addition, he has also threatened to impose 25 per cent tariffs on automotive imports, which, if applied in Canada and Mexico, could affect American consumers and companies because of the integration of auto manufacturing in North America.

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Volpe likened the North American auto sector to a bicycle, in which Canada and Mexico are the wheels and the U.S. is the frame.

“If Trump decides to shove a stick through a wheel, what happens to the bike? I don’t have to tell them because they’ll understand,” he said.

Even U.S. executives have said tariffs could quickly disrupt the entire industry.

“Let’s be real honest, long term, a 25 per cent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Ford chief executive Jim Farley said at a conference in New York on Feb. 12.

A week later at a conference in Miami, GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said his company has been preparing for tariffs by moving “finished product” into the U.S. before tariffs take effect.

But he added that GM remains uncertain about whether the tariffs could become permanent and whether it would relocate operations out of Canada or Mexico.

“Those are questions that just don’t have an answer today,” Jacobson said, ”because I can tell you as much as the market is pricing in a big impact of tariffs and lost profitability, think about a world where, on top of that, we’re spending billions of dollars in capital and then it ends, right? So, we can’t be whipsawing the business back and forth.”

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His comments have unnerved some Canadian auto insiders who see the effect of Trump’s threats — whether enacted or not — as undermining investment in Canada’s auto sector, which accounts for 128,000 jobs and produces the country’s second-largest export, valued at $51 billion in 2023.

Industry advocates say automakers want to invest in operations in Canada for good reasons.

For one thing, it is the largest export market by value for U.S. automakers by a wide margin, accounting for US$23.2 billion in sales in 2023. That’s roughly the same size as the next nine largest export markets combined, including Germany, Mexico, China, the United Arab Emirates, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Australia and Japan, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.

Charlotte Yates, former president of the University of Guelph, whose research focuses on the Canadian auto sector, said she does not believe U.S. consumers or workers could withstand tariffs on a long-term basis because the hit to the economy would be too acute.

Nonetheless, she predicted that the threats alone could deter some companies from investing in Canada’s auto supply chain.

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Yates said the mood has already shifted and any talk about continuing to grow the EV supply chain in Canada by attracting another automaker has all but disappeared.

“I think our government has to step in and really work hard to look after our national interests,” she said.

Of course, the threats of tariffs arrive at an awkward moment for the auto sector. At the federal level, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced his intention to resign on March 9, but which party forms the new government won’t be known for months.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne has said he will fight for the auto sector.

“It’s no secret: the global EV industry will face some trials in the road ahead,” his spokesperson Audrey Milette said via email. “And sometimes, to ensure long-term success, (automakers) need to make adjustments to their timelines. EV technology is here to stay, and we’re making sure that Canada leads the way.”

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Meanwhile, in Ontario, where an estimated 80 per cent of the auto sector’s jobs are located, Premier Doug Ford called a special election in late January that has also raised questions about how the province has been responding to Trump’s threats.

Back at Stellantis, Hines said he had been expecting sales to finally tick up in 2025 after several years plagued by problems out of his control, such as the pandemic, a semiconductor chip shortage and higher interest rates.

“Business seems to be going in the right direction,” he said. “So, we’re confident that absent all the craziness that’s going on today — absent any of that — we expect at least the same as last year, if not slightly above.”

• Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com

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