March 16, 2026 | Trump tariffs cost automakers $35B; Bosch’s Mohammad Fatouraie

Welcome to Daily Drive.

For Monday, March 16th, 2026, I'm Kellyn Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, Trump's tariffs have cost automakers at least $35 billion since last

year.

China Bands pop out door handles and yoke steering wheels in new EV safety rules.

And the FTC puts 97 dealership groups on notice about advertising practices.

Plus, we're here from Bosch's Muhammad Faturi about how suppliers are dealing with changing

EV projections.

With this multi-lane approach or multi-energy platform, you can design a system that not

only fits into the battery electric vehicles, but also it can be fits into the plug-in hybrid

electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles.

Let's run through all the news.

You need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Trump's tariffs have racked up at least a $35 billion tab for automakers since last year.

That's according to an automotive news analysis of financial reports.

Toyota's getting hit the hardest facing more than $9 billion in costs through this month.

The Detroit 3, shelled out $6.5 billion last year alone.

How much each company pays depends on where they build their cars and get their parts.

A lot of automakers ate those costs at first, but now they're passing them along to buyers.

We'll have more on this story in a minute with our own John Irwin.

China is positioning itself as the world's new EV safety cop.

And given the size of its market, the rest of the industry may have no choice but to follow

along.

After deadly fires trapped people inside Xiaomi EVs when pop-out door handles lost power,

Beijing banned the sleek technology outright.

Starting in 2027, new rules also nicks, yoke steering wheels and require good old-fashioned

physical buttons for turn signals and hazards.

No more hunting through touch screens.

Here's why it matters.

According to the China passenger car association, China controls 68% of global EV sales.

That kind of market power means when Beijing set standards, automakers worldwide pay

attention.

What happens there matters everywhere.

Europe and North America are already reviewing similar safety concerns, including Tesla's

door handles.

And the Federal Trade Commission is putting 97 dealership groups on notice about their

advertising practices.

The agency says advertised prices need to include all required fees, except for government

charges like taxes.

The means no surprise add-ons at the end of the deal.

The FTC flagged six practices it says are illegal.

Things like advertising cars that don't exist or prices that only work if you finance through

the dealer.

Here's the catch.

The letters say the agency is concerned these groups might be breaking the rules, but

hasn't actually concluded they are.

And a DA says most dealers play by the rules.

And those are today's headlines for more on those stories, head over to autonews.com.

Joining me now to talk more about how much President Trump's tariffs have cost automakers

in the past year is our own John Erwin, who covers the supply chain as well as GM for

us at automotive news.

John, welcome back to daily drive.

Thanks for having me on.

All right, John, $35 billion is a staggering number.

Walk us through how you arrived at that figure and what surprised you most when you dug

into these financial reports?

Yeah, basically, as we're approaching the one year anniversary in April of the auto tariffs

going into place as well as the reciprocal tariffs that have since been struck down by

the Supreme Court, we thought it would be a good idea to look at, to dig through financial

reports and take a look at how automakers have been faring given all the tariff costs

have been piling up for them over the past year, basically dug through every single automakers

financial reports over the past year, looking at basically trying to, you know, tally

up over the course of the past, you know, 12 to 15 months, how much automakers have reported

paying into tariffs.

And that $35 billion number is actually probably a little bit higher than what we're saying

with $35 billion because when you dig through some automakers have basically just reported

20, 25 figures and have yet to break out real numbers for this year because, you know,

the first quarter is still going on.

Maybe they've had projections, but not real numbers yet.

So we didn't include those other automakers whose financial calendars fall, you know, into

end in March of 2026, for instance, like Toyota, they do have numbers kind of through last

year and more specific projections, just through March of this year, we ended up including

those were basically just like through March, what have automakers paid?

And that's what we ended up at this $35 billion figure.

That is very much by, you know, automaker, how big of a number this is, you know, some

automakers were talking like Toyota, for instance, $9 billion or so, other automakers, smaller

figures, a lot of that just depends on how much of their vehicle lineup they're importing,

how large their sales figures are, how much of the key components that they import into

the US for vehicles that they build here imported from outside of North America, et cetera.

These numbers range pretty significantly, but I think what kind of, I don't know if it's

a surprise per se, but I think one thing that really was driven home for me when I was

digging through these numbers was just that this is impacting everybody regardless of,

you know, if you're based in North America, or you have, you know, a pretty significant

manufacturing presence in the US, you're still, because of the global nature of the supply

chain, you're still importing a lot of your parts into the US, a lot of automakers are

still building vehicles, obviously outside of the US importing them in, they're trying

to move things around where they can, but there's only so much they can do.

So at the end of the day, they're paying these tariffs, and for a lot of companies, it's

well over a billion dollars that they paid so far, and gotta keep in mind, too, the last

year, that that's really just for a portion of the year, most of these tariffs that they've

been paying really only went into effect starting in April for vehicles and in May for parts.

So we're looking at full year now, coming ahead for tariff impacts, and we'll see, obviously

automakers have been trying to minimize the financial fallout as much as they can, but,

you know, these tariffs are going to be here to say it appears, at least the auto tariff,

so we'll see what these numbers look like next year, and I'll be curious to see if the

figures are higher or lower, how automakers have maybe shifted things around to try to

minimize the impact, especially again.

Well, as you mentioned, Toyota is bearing the brunt of this with over gosh, nine billion

dollars, but what is driving the disparity between Toyota and other automakers?

Yeah, I think your Toyota, a lot of it just comes down to, you know, how much of how many

vehicles they sell in the US and how many of them are imported.

They do have a very significant presence in North America, obviously manufacturing, but a lot

of the key components for those vehicles are still sourced from Japan or elsewhere, and those

parts have a tariff attached to them. So I think it sort of reflects just the sheer size of Toyota,

you know, they're selling way more vehicles than most other automakers, importing a lot of them,

and then when they're not importing them, they're importing some key parts. So at the end of the

day that that figure ends up being, you know, pretty significant, but Toyota at the same time,

you know, you could argue, despite those high costs, you know, they've highlighted ways that they've

tried to, you know, minimize the impact that that's had in their bottom lines. That's another

thing that kind of stood out to me as I'm digging through these financial figures is that, you know,

for some automakers, especially some of the smaller, more niche ones, when you dig into like an

Ascent Martin, for instance, you know, they're very explicit saying, you know, we're, they've

Ascent Martin said all sorts of dead issues for years, but they weren't able to cut into that

this year because of the tariffs that they had to pay. Whereas Toyota, you know, it seems at

least not to minimize a $9 billion tariff at all, but you know, they've made some moves to,

you know, try to minimize the impact that'll have in their bottom line, you know, we'll see

coming up here, you know, the end of their financial year is in the next couple of weeks,

and you know, we'll get an earnings report after that, but it appears like they might be able to

weather that maybe a little better than some other automakers, but yeah, at the end of the day,

it's $9 billion that, you know, they could have had elsewhere, but they had to account for,

you know, just because of the, again, the global nature of the supply chain, even if you have,

you know, a lot of manufacturing facilities set up in the US, you're still importing,

especially for a company like Toyota, based in Japan, you're still importing a lot of those

parts into the US. So yeah, again, this is just something that, you know, these numbers keep adding up

and at the end of the day, it's just automakers trying to figure out how they can manage their

supply chains and a lot of those decisions can take a long time to implement.

John Rowan always insightful, my friend. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks so much. Coming up next, Muhammad Ferturie from Bosch talks about how suppliers are

adapting to the tumultuous EV market that's next on Daily Drive.

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AutoNews.com. Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellan Walker. A policy whiplash surrounding

electric vehicles has left many suppliers scrambling. Companies tooled up and invested based

on EV projections that ultimately didn't materialize, creating financial pressure across the industry.

But some companies are able to navigate through the situation better than others,

with help from deeper pockets and more diverse portfolios.

Muhammad Ferturie is director of the Engineering and Power Solutions Division at Bosch.

He joined our own Mali Boygon on the latest episode of the Automotive News shift podcast.

Here's a piece of that conversation. It's been a very tumultuous couple of years up and down

the automotive value chain, including different companies adapting to the changing projections

around EV adoption. Companies like Bosch, tools up and invested based on EV projections that

ultimately didn't materialize. So how is Bosch dealing right now with the financial pressure

of having made those investments now that the volumes haven't materialized? Of course. Yes,

as you mentioned, it has been some tumultuous years coming from the COVID disruptions into the

supply chain and the geopolitical topics in Europe. Now we have some of the more immediate

geopolitical topics in the Middle East and it's all coming at the same time. What is important

for us at Bosch is that we always have the technology neutral, multi-path approach when we are

developing, deploying both in terms of the technology development as well as deployment of the

investments for industrialization of those developed technologies. We work very closely with our OEM

partners as well as forecasting the technological trends of the future and we reflect these forecasts

in the decisions that we're making for product development as well as the industrialization.

As you mentioned, the take rate of the battery electric vehicles in the market were not as expected

by the industry but this was also a trend that we had in our scenario planning. So we had other

plans based on the approaches that we had to be able to shift our product portfolio as well as

our investments commensurate to the needs that we had from the market. Can you talk a little bit

more about that scenario planning? Is that typical for different technology trends you're identifying?

It sounds like you had sort of like different potential scenarios that you were planning for.

Can you just explain a little bit more how that works? Yeah, so very specifically for the powertrain

types that we are discussing. We have scenario planning that takes into consideration

multiple factors coming from the consumer, coming from the regulatory perspective,

economic development as well as technology development that we have and those scenarios are being

updated regularly. This used to be annual but now it's even more frequent scenarios that we have

and it has to be very clear. These are not forecasts or predictions. These are rather scenarios

based on very concrete assumptions that we put behind these scenarios.

Therefore, when we're making decisions, we are making the decisions based on the realization

of those assumptions that we had for those scenarios and that brings us a little bit more flexibility

to shift from a scenario to an end. How many scenarios is it typically? Are you able to say?

I won't go to the details but it is mainly three main scenarios but there are some sub scenarios

of those or variants of those scenarios. Okay, got it. Let's say you've created this set of

assumptions, as you said, that's governing three scenarios and one of them at a certain point

appears to be the most likely to materialize. Does that then impact your design of a particular

component or what happens once you realize one of the scenarios is appearing to take precedence

over the others? Yeah, so exactly as you mentioned, as we discussed these scenarios, then the next

level would be the trickling down of these scenarios into different divisions and different business

units that are impacted or the scenarios are reflecting their product portfolio. This goes into

the some of the development of the variants or sometimes new platform developments that would be

making the scenarios achievable. So this goes along the lines of both technology side and then

in parallel to that, we have our business scenarios that are going with the technology scenarios.

At the end of the day, just having the technology is not important. You need to have a business case,

you need to have an industrialization solution or plan for the scenario and all in all

across the divisions with the different business units, we basically go through the process.

I know this is sort of a technical question but I wonder if you may be able to try to explain

how you design a component when it's going to be powertrain, agnostic or multi-energy platform.

Where does the common layer begin and end as far as that goes? Very good question and that's

the reason that I'm here. I'm responsible for systems engineering and in order to have a multi-energy

platform as you mentioned, you need to have a good understanding of the whole vehicle system

and vehicle system can extend beyond just the component or the sub system that we are supplying

to the vehicle. It can include the vehicle itself or even beyond the vehicle when you're talking

about connected vehicles and all of that. It also has the interface with the rest of the infrastructure

being the charging or the cloud infrastructure. Depending on the sub project, this system view

is a little bit different. Let's be specific about powertrain. What we look, of course, you have

the technology pillars from classical ICE towards the hybrids, plug-in hybrids, range extender

EVs and electric vehicles. Not all of the components of these vehicles are unique

but there are some systems that are or historically has been designed bespoke to these powertrains.

An example that I can mention is, for example, the thermal management is a big point for the

battery electric vehicles. One of the pain points of battery electric vehicles historically,

and I can say it as a bed driver for the past five plus years, is living in Michigan when you

have a whatever 12 degree winter day outside and you're commuting to work to range suffers

significantly. And this has been part of the technology development, of course, a Bosch but also

OEMs and the other supply partners of the OEMs. The question now here is that,

are you designing a system that is bespoke that only can satisfy and be retrofitted into the

battery electric vehicle platforms or with this multi-lane approach or multi-energy platform,

you can design a system that not only fits into the battery electric vehicles,

but also it can be fit into the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles.

This would mean that you really need to go at the vehicle level and have from the onset a system

design that is capable of this adjustments and retrofitted into the packaging envelopes into the

technical requirements as well as the performance requirements that is significantly different

between these platforms. Mohamed Fatturi of Bosch spoke with our own Molly Boygon.

You can hear the full conversation on the latest episode of the Automotive News Shift Podcast,

available now wherever you get your podcasts. That's daily drive for today. I'm Kellyn Walker.

Thanks to Automotive News Executive Producer Jake Near as well as our own John Irwin,

and John Hudder for their reporting for today's podcast. You can get the latest news on suppliers,

tariff costs, and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com. Come back tomorrow for

a conversation with Ronald Clywick about how the Iran War is disrupting automotive supply chains.

The longer this takes, the higher the impact, so I think it's not so much the price only. It's

also the dependency on the oil which is coming out of the straight of the Volmuz. I think that

could potentially have a bigger impact. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of

the show and the topics we cover today. Send us an email at dailydriveatautonews.com

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