Two American Pickups Will Be Shielded From Tariffs

Don’t get this wrong. General Motors already makes its GMC Sierra/Silverado 1500 pickups in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But it also sold 214,819 Sierra light-duty pickups and 369,090 Silverado light/medium duty trucks in the U.S. in 2024. That latter figure is almost the exact output of pickups GM made in Mexico and imported to the U.S. last year, according to reporting from Reuters.

During an earnings call in January, GM CEO Mary Barra said that the carmaker was considering shifting assembly around in order to cope with tariffs. So this news doesn’t come out of the blue—but it’s likely still a headache for GM. Here’s what it could mean for consumers, too.

Pickup, And Move To Indiana

According to a report by Mexico Business News, GM exported 653,200 cars and trucks to the U.S. last year. But Barra’s comment back in January was that GM has flexibility to isolate where it makes which vehicles for export. Like Ford (and BMW), as well as other brands, GM makes a lot of cars in North America that are then shipped overseas.

At the time of that comment, however, Barra may not have been thinking about reciprocal tariffs. So when she suggested that GM’s workaround would be to move more truck production to the U.S. for domestic consumption, and then to export from, say, Mexico and Canada for both domestic and foreign consumption, reciprocal tariffs might crush those hopes. If said countries tax on any American-made content (and as you’ll see below, there’s a lot of that in Sierra/Silverado trucks), those sales will drop as the trucks’ prices rise.

More Jobs — But More Costs

GM said it will hire some non-union employees to help ramp up more production at the Indiana facility. That’s supposed to be between 225–250 employees.

That’s not nearly enough to account for a 370,000 annual increase in production that would be necessary to compensate for the Sierra and Silverado trucks coming out of Mexico last year.

Don’t forget: GM pickups, like Ford’s F-Series and Stellantis’s Ram, are relatively high-margin vehicles as well as high-volume ones. They are regularly in the top ranking of all cars sold by volume.

Damage to that volume hits directly in the teeth of the cash machine of these carmakers, which means higher costs even for cars with proportionally more domestic assembly and parts; less profit at volume by default raises the margins GM needs from the rest of its portfolio.

TopSpeed’s Take

We recently reported that another leading truck sold in the U.S., the Tacoma, which is having excellent sales success this spring, may get a bit of a break on tariffs. This is in large part because, like the Silverado/Sierra, manufacturing is closely integrated with key components made on both sides of the border and vague language on how tariffs will be enforced on parts mixes may leave wiggle room to reduce the total tab.

The Toyota Tacoma and Silverado both have a lot of foreign and domestic parts, which leaves both models highly vulnerable to tariffs, regardless of where they see final assembly.

The upshot is that GM, like Toyota, is likely to try to jigger aspects like final assembly more than parts. That’s because retooling their entire supply chain is far too costly and disruptive. But note the aforementioned parts mix. We have doubts that moving the final assembly still won’t amount to major cost increases for consumers, possibly to the tune of thousands of dollars per truck.