What If GM Increased Production Capacity In The U.S. To Avoid Trump Tariffs?

Tariffs have been in the headlines, including here on GM Authority, since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term because new tariffs threatened and implemented by the new administration have a big impact on the auto industry. GM has said it can mitigate up to half of potential import tariffs and believes it has a good playbook in case new tariffs on Mexico and Canada really happen.

Part of GM’s plan is quite simple: utilize existing production capacity in the U.S. to build more USDM cars domestically. But what if General Motors tried to build all of the vehicles it sells in the U.S. here in the States? Is it even possible with existing capacity? Let’s crunch the numbers and find out.

Let’s start with the crossovers imported from Asia. The Buick Encore GX, Buick Envista, Chevy Trailblazer, and Chevy Trax are all built in South Korea. Meanwhile, the Buick Envision is built in China. During the 2024 calendar year, GM sold a combined 461,982 units of these crossovers.

Across GM’s two Canadian and three Mexican plants, GM built 1,061,973 vehicles in 2024 according to the Automotive News Data Center. According to TradeImeX, about 750,000 of those vehicles were exported to the U.S., most of which came from Mexico.

So, our best estimate for the total number of imported vehicles GM sold in the U.S. in 2024 is 1,211,982. Can it build that many more cars, trucks, and crossovers in the States? Let’s see what plants GM could use.

Orion and Fairfax are currently idle as they’re being retooled for EV production. Orion is supposed to build electric trucks on the BT1 platform, while Fairfax will build the next-gen 2026 Chevy Bolt EV. Also, production of the Cadillac CT4 and CT5 is slowing down considerably at Lansing Grand River, as these two sedans won’t be on the market for much longer.

What if GM scraps all those plant allocations to build ICE crossovers and ICE pickups instead? The following table shows each of the three plants’ highest capacity recorded in the last decade (using Automotive New Data Center). Coincidentally, all of these capacities were recorded during the 2014 calendar year.

Add them all up, and we’re looking at a potential of 486,145 units. 1,211,982 minus 486,145 brings us to 725,837 vehicles, for which we still need to find American factory capacity.

All of GM’s other U.S. assembly plants are pretty much maxed out at the moment, but what if GM buys back the Lordstown assembly plant in Ohio that it sold in 2019 (which President Trump wasn’t happy about)? The annual vehicle production capacity at Lordstown was 299,227 units back in 2015. If we subtract that from the number we came up with above, that brings us down to 426,610 vehicles that would still need a home in a U.S. facility.

While General Motors can move some production around to build more USDM vehicles in the U.S., it appears almost impossible for The General to build every car it sells in the States domestically without building more factories. President Trump recently mentioned $60 billion in U.S. investments that GM is planning, but it’s unclear whether that’s new investments, already-planned investments, or a mixture of both. If some of that is a new investment, it could indeed be going toward more U.S. manufacturing, but it would likely take an even bigger budget than that to pay for our hypothetical reshoring plan.