'Let me take you through the math': Ford CEO on how tariffs could impact vehicle pricing

Well, not for us in auto. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I made our most profitable auto company, and Ford is the most American auto company. We make 80 plus percent of our vehicles here. And to your point, you know, it's tough to tell right now. The reason is because we're seeing double digit sales increases since March and April, but we ran this employee pricing. I don't know if that's unique to us. There may be a lot of customers going out and buying cars, you know, before what they fear is the imports increasing prices. That may be a dynamic. We're certainly seeing our inventories are shrinking at the dealership.

We're just seeing a lot of people respond to our employee pricing. And Ford is an American company. I think, you know, for many years, half of the vehicles sold in the U.S. were imported. Maybe not everyone knew that. So it's hard for me to tell. I think we're in the first or second inning here of a nine inning game. But so far for us in the auto, you know, the revenue has been pretty strong. We report earnings next week. And you'll see that as well. But as you said, there are a lot of ins and outs. So when it comes to tariffs, it's complicated.

No, I would say first, I don't want to preview our earnings, but I will say some basic things. We know exactly what the tariff would look like, you know, in terms of cost for the company. We know the offsets. What we don't know is how competitors are going to respond. You know, we're the most American company. So if there's any company that can manage through these tariffs, it's Ford. We make 80% here. And our competitors are different. Even the domestic competitors are some of the biggest importers in our industry. So, you know, they will have a totally different tariff bill. You don't think of all the three domestic companies as the same. We're not really different. But as I said, you know, next week I think we'll be able to tell people kind of what the tariff bills for Ford would look like, the most American company. What kind of offsets? What we don't know, Aaron, is what are the import competitors going to do? Are they going to build ten factories? Are they going to take pricing and pass it on to the customer this summer? You know, the stuff we built now is priced. If we announce a price increase now, it'll go into play in July and August. So we have to wait until then to see what our competitors do. I hope that makes sense.