WACO, Texas (KXXV) — As the tariff war continues, President Trump’s 25% tariffs on foreign cars and auto parts is expected to hit this week.
Chris Perales is the owner of Perales Brothers Automotive in Waco and last month 25News' Bobby Poitevint spoke with him about the potential impacts of tariffs on the auto industry.
He said, "now what we’re seeing is, of course, prices going up.”
On Wednesday, he said repair estimates given two months ago are no longer valid.
In fact, he believes estimates have gone up about 10% since we last spoke to him in early March.
“It’s parts, yeah. It’s imported parts. I think it’s also just maybe some fear and, they’re gonna go ahead and start preparing now for increases and supply shortages and so on and, some of it may be normal economic increases.”
The Trump administration claiming the 25% tariffs would encourage domestic auto manufacturing thus raising $100B in annual revenue.
We are already seeing some of those investments being made.
Just last week, Hyundai announced a new 21 billion dollar investment in the U.S. auto industry.
After working under the hood on repairs for decades, Chris has noticed something about vehicles made here in America.
"Truth be told, a lot of our new cars that are built here in America are built with a lot of foreign parts," Chris said. "So there’s no such thing as a true American built car. There’s a lot of imported parts on it.”
Chris believes all of this creates uncertainty for customers looking to buy a vehicle right now and is likely even driving them to keep their current car longer.
Something he has seen first hand and added, “matter of fact, we had a customer in here just yesterday that had been considering repairing their car and they thought 'well it’s too expensive so I’m gonna go ahead and look for another car.' Well they called back and said, 'you know what even used cars are very expensive right now. So we’re gonna go ahead and do the repairs on ours.' So we went ahead and made an appointment for them.”
Chris said this may work in the favor of repair shops, but he said, sadly, the price hikes would likely be passed down to customers.
“I think we really won’t see the biggest increases for another couple of months or so.”
To learn more about how this is impacting our local dealerships, we made several attempts to speak to several vehicle dealerships on Franklin Avenue in Waco and also Waco foreign vehicle dealerships like Hyundai and Toyota.
