Car Buyers’ Guide For the Patriotic

With the global economy and all, "buying American" isn’t as simple as it used to be. And there are a lot of myths and twisted statistics being bounced around around about the "American made" status of various import makes, largely as a result of those manufacturers’ marketing efforts. But the single biggest way to help the US economy with a new-car purchase, according to a recent article by Forbes, is still to buy a domestic-branded vehicle containing the highest possible percentage of parts sourced from North America. More…

A couple of factors to keep in mind: one is that every vehicle, no matter what the make, contains a mix of parts from all over the world, and the percentage of domestic vs. foreign content is required to be displayed on a new car’s window sticker. Perhaps surprising to some, American makes and models still top the lists for most domestic content, and tend on average to have more American-made parts than the imports. The second thing is that the nationality of the manufacturer determines where in the world that company’s profits accrue. So despite the appearance of a handful of imports on the Cars.com list of highest domestic-content cars, and despite the high-profile plant openings in the American south by some Japanese manufacturers, the lion’s share of profits for the sale of these cars still simply goes back to Japan. As one of the analysts quoted in the Forbes article says, "You buy a Toyota and the profit accrues in Tokyo. You buy a GM made in Canada and the profit still accrues in Detroit. Buyers of foreign-branded cars take delight in knowing that their cars are assembled in the U.S. But the value added in the assembly process is not all that great. At the end of the day, it’s where the profits accrue that really matters."

Finally, there’s the issue of employment, and the frequently-cited "fact" that Toyota "employs more Americans that GM." Not true: GM employs more US citizens than all the foreign automakers combined. Maybe people’s misconception on this issue can be traced to the recent period of expansion by foreign automakers into US markets, when it was likely that Toyota was actively employing (i.e, hiring) more Americans than the struggling domestics. Their PR firm must’ve decided to run with that one and to find a way to make it stick. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard it since.

Still, in light of the complexity of the issue, it sure is nice if you know you’ll never have to worry about getting the most patriotic mileage out of a new-car purchase. I mean, just keep buying 1000-dollar project cars off eBay and you’ll know that every cent of the profit from their sales is going straight into the pockets of hard-working Americans. Happy Fourth, everyone!