Trump meets big automakers, ready to make easier plants in US

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pushed the heads of GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler to build more of their cars in the United States and boost American employment in the process.

After weeks of taunting the automotive industry over Twitter, Trump made a point to meet with the CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler just days into his term. He has pressured the companies to build more vehicles in the U.S. and hire more Americans into manufacturing jobs.

"I want new plants to be built here for cars sold here!" Trump said in a tweet ahead of the breakfast meeting with automakers, saying he would discuss U.S. jobs with the chief executives.

President Trump told the chief executives that environmental regulations are “out of control” and his administration will focus on “real regulations that mean something” while eliminating those that he finds inhospitable to business.
Though Trump spoke often on the campaign trail about the need to revive manufacturing across the economy, he narrowed in on the automotive industry in particular in the weeks following his election. He separately criticized Ford, GM and Toyota for plans to build certain cars in Mexico and then sell them in the U.S and has threatened to impose 35 per cent tariffs on imported vehicles. Yet some of the most popular and profitable vehicles sold in the United States by Detroit's Big 3 automakers are imported from Mexico. 

“We have a very big push on to have auto plants and other plants, many other plants, you’re not being singled out … to have a lot of plants from a lot of different items built in the United States,” Trump told executives Tuesday. “It’s happening. It’s happening, bigly.”

Under current NAFTA rules, a vehicle can be sold within the United States, Canada or Mexico free of any tariffs as long as 62.5 per cent of the car's components are from within the bloc. 

Timmons, the president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, argued that the Trump administration is stepping up to defend the "forgotten group of people" from a business environment that left them behind.

The meeting was the first time CEOs of the big three automakers met jointly with a U.S. president since a July 2011 session with then-president Barack Obama to tout a deal to nearly double fuel efficiency standards to 5.2 litres per 100 kilometres by 2025.