Jaguar Land Rover, the British luxury automaker, said on Saturday that it was pausing shipments to the United States in April, days after President Trump’s auto tariffs went into effect.
The company, which makes luxury cars that include Jaguars, Defenders and Range Rovers, does not have manufacturing facilities in the United States and exports all the cars it sells there. In the last three months of 2024, it shipped 38,000 cars to the United States. The Trump administration imposed a tariff of 25 percent on imported cars as of Thursday.
“The U.S.A. is an important market for JLR’s luxury brands,” the company said in a statement. “As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are enacting our short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans.”
The United States is the largest single-country export market for British cars, with 6.4 billion pounds ($8.3 billion) worth of vehicles shipped there in 2023. That’s about a tenth of Britain’s overall exports in goods.
The auto tariffs pose a particular challenge for British luxury carmakers, which also include Bentley and Aston Martin, because they sell relatively few vehicles and, therefore, tend to have only a small number of production sites. For them, setting up manufacturing in the United States hasn’t been economical, leaving them without an easy way to circumnavigate tariffs.
Jaguar Land Rover sells about a fifth of its cars in the United States. In its financial year that ended in March 2024, it sold about 95,000 cars and reported £6.5 billion in revenue for sales in the United States. If the company were to add the full cost of the tariffs to the price of its cars, it would add thousands of dollars.
Other British exports to the United States face a 10 percent tariff, which Mr. Trump announced this past week on what he called “Liberation Day.” So far, the British government hasn’t retaliated, and officials have said they are focused on reaching a trade deal with the United States focused on technology. At the same time, officials are consulting with businesses over the next four weeks on a list of U.S. imports that could face retaliatory British tariffs.
The United States is Britain’s second-largest trading partner, though that trade is easily dwarfed by the flow of goods and services between Britain and the European Union. Britain’s trade with the United States is heavily skewed toward services.
The trade in goods, which President Trump has been concentrating on, is relatively in balance. In 2023, Britain imported about £58 billion of goods and exported about £60 billion, according to the British Office for National Statistics.
Shares in Tata Motors, the Indian parent company of Jaguar Land Rover, dropped more than 9 percent this past week and are trading at their lowest level since mid-2023.
