Triad auto shops feel impact of tariffs on China
GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — While some of President Donald Trump's tariffs have been put on a 90-day hold, the owner of an auto shop in Greensboro says mechanics are being affected by it.
Greensboro mechanic Jamie Morris says some car parts that are typically imported from China are now hard to get.
'They're telling me up to six months to wait for this drive shaft,' Morris said.
It's a frustrating timeline for the owner of the Anything on Wheels auto shop in Greensboro.
The tariffs that China and Trump have imposed on each other right after midnight on Wednesday are only making things more complicated for car mechanics.
'It's not the auto mechanic world. It's the parts. They can't get the stuff in, so they can't supply us with the parts. We've tried junk yards with the customers,' Morris said.
Morris says car parts for Toyotas, Hondas, Acuras and anything electrical are currently back logged, and the price for some car parts has already gone up,
'Overnight a [car] part went from $130 to $134,' Morris said.
As the tariff rates fluctuate every day, the prices are expected to continue to climb.
While she waits for parts to come in, all Morris is asking from customers on behalf of all auto shops is patience.
'Some people have had to put down their cars for months before they're allowed to drive them. If you have to put your car down, how are you going to get to work?' Morris said.
Morris says as the trade war between the U.S and China continues, a network of auto shops in the Piedmont Triad are sharing car parts with each other if they're having a hard time receiving imports.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
US Steel Sale to Nippon Steel Poised to Close After Trump Deal
(Bloomberg) -- Nippon Steel Corp. won conditional US approval for its $14.1 billion purchase of United States Steel Corp., capping a lengthy saga in a tie-up that will create one of the world's largest steel companies. Shuttered NY College Has Alumni Fighting Over Its Future Trump's Military Parade Has Washington Bracing for Tanks and Weaponry NYC Renters Brace for Price Hikes After Broker-Fee Ban Do World's Fairs Still Matter? As Part of a $45 Billion Push, ICE Prepares for a Vast Expansion of Detention Space In a release Friday, the companies said they've committed to a national security agreement proposed by the Trump administration, which earlier cleared the deal subject to those terms. As part of the $55-per-share deal, the Japanese company will invest an additional $11 billion by 2028, including an initial commitment in a greenfield project that would be completed after 2028. Nippon had previously raised its pledged additional investment in an effort to win President Donald Trump's approval. Nippon Steel will also spend an extra $3 billion after 2028 for a new steel mill, according to people familiar with the matter. That would push the total additional investment — on top of the purchase price — to $14 billion. Earlier Friday, Trump formally opened the door to approving the sale of US Steel by submitting the agreement to the companies and amending former President Joe Biden's move to block the agreement in an executive order. The president's action cleared the sale so long as the companies comply with the government's terms. 'President Trump promised to protect American Steel and American Jobs — and he has delivered on that promise,' White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a written statement. 'Today's executive order ensures US Steel will remain in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and be safeguarded as a critical element of America's national and economic security.' Nippon Steel and US Steel in the release said they had received regulatory approvals and that 'the partnership is expected to be finalized promptly.' The deal is expected to close by June 18, the merger agreement deadline, Japan's Nikkei reported on Saturday, without saying where it got the information. Trump earlier this week said the US would receive a so-called golden share in the post-transaction company, though it's not clear what that would entail. The companies confirmed that the US would get a golden share but didn't elaborate. The terms of the security agreement include significant and unprecedented US control measures, as well as certain control over some board seats and requirements that some leadership roles go to American citizens, according to a person familiar with the pact, speaking on condition of anonymity. The golden share does not include an equity stake in the company, the person said. Earlier: Nippon Steel Plans $6 Billion Investment in Its Japanese Mills 'The Japanese government believes that this investment will strengthen the ability of the Japanese and US steel industries to generate new innovation and lead to the strengthening of the close partnership between Japan and the US,' Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Yoji Muto, said in a written statement. 'We welcome the decision of the US government.' Trump and Biden as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned against the deal, before the former president blocked it in January. Trump has since reversed his position, insisting that the agreement would preserve steel jobs in the US. The text of the security agreement hasn't been released. Trump and others have previously announced other elements of the deal, including bonuses to steelworkers, a requirement to keep existing blast furnaces running for a decade, and government veto power to retain control over the board of the US Steel subsidiary. Trump has also hailed the accord as vindication of his trade policies, which have seen the administration levy tariffs in a bid to pressure companies to shift more manufacturing to the US. Japan has been engaging in negotiations with the US over trade in a bid to avoid higher levies Trump has threatened. Trump's decision to champion Nippon Steel's bid offers to provide fresh momentum for those talks. Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania two weeks ago, at US Steel's iconic Mon Valley facility, celebrating the deal with a crowd of steelworkers, even though it had not yet been finalized. Earlier: US, Mexico Near Deal to Cut Steel Duties and Cap Imports Trump also used that event to announce he was doubling his tariffs on steel and aluminum, raising them to 50% from 25%. Since that rally, government officials, company executives and deal advisers worked to hammer out the finer details and get the final signatures. The deal creates a combined company that will be the world's second-largest steelmaker. It will become a formidable domestic competitor to Nucor Corp., which for a generation has dominated the American steel industry. The acquisition also clears the way for enhanced steelmaking in areas the US has lagged in recent years, including the type of steel critical to bolster ailing electric grids across the country. The Japanese steelmaker's takeover became a political lightning rod after the leadership of the United Steelworkers – based, like US Steel itself, in Pittsburgh – staunchly opposed the tie-up. Biden sided with them, as did Trump. The deal has taken a winding path with extensions, a Biden block, a legal fight, and then Trump's decision to reexamine it before ultimately clearing it. Nippon Steel and US Steel have steadily tried to address worries, with Vice Chairman Takahiro Mori making repeated visits to the US to clinch the deal. Divisions within the union were laid bare through the process, with local union leaders expressing support for the deal and breaking with their national leadership. Trump's reversal was a few months in the making. In February, he surprised the parties by blessing some kind of a minority stake — an announcement they hadn't been privy to and didn't understand. The deal, then and now, was built on Nippon Steel buying US Steel entirely. The question was mitigation measures. The president said he supported a 'planned partnership' between the companies on May 23, without providing details of an announcement that appeared to bless the original deal with additional mitigation measures. --With assistance from Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Meghashyam Mali and Yoshiaki Nohara. (Updates with potential closing timeframe in eighth paragraph.) American Mid: Hampton Inn's Good-Enough Formula for World Domination The Spying Scandal Rocking the World of HR Software New Grads Join Worst Entry-Level Job Market in Years As Companies Abandon Climate Pledges, Is There a Silver Lining? US Tariffs Threaten to Derail Vietnam's Historic Industrial Boom ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump Just Revoked California's EV Rules. How Much Is California To Blame?
President Donald Trump just revoked California's permission to enforce its nation-leading clean-car rules — and Mary Nichols understands why. "No one likes being regulated," she told me ahead of Thursday's Oval Office signing ceremony. Nichols knows that better than almost anyone. As head of California's Air Resources Board for 17 years, she brought the world's biggest automakers to heel using the state's unique authority to go further than the federal government in setting vehicle emissions standards. It's those same automakers who lobbied Trump to "rescue the U.S. auto industry from destruction by terminating California's electric vehicle mandate once and for all," as Trump put it Thursday. It didn't have to get to this point. California officials had been in talks with automakers prior to the November election about how to keep them on board, but the state overplayed its hand, Nichols said. "Many people were acting on the assumption that it was going to be the Democrats continuing in power," she said. "So the state felt like they had all the cards in their hand, and then after the election, it was pretty hard to reset the conversation." To hear Nichols tell it, California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035. Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California's targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent, according to the industry's latest figures. "They were definitely having issues with the California program because they didn't think they could meet the sales numbers in the mandate, especially [Gov. Gavin] Newsom's target of nothing but ZEVs with a deadline attached to it," Nichols said. "That was scary, and even the interim targets were going to be hard to meet." The pendulum has swung against California before: The George W. Bush administration was the first to attempt to deny California's permission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require automakers to sell increasing percentages of zero-emission vehicles, and Trump went further in his first term by attempting to revoke the state's already-issued authority. But Republicans had never resorted to doing it through Congress, via an untested maneuver that congressional watchdogs have warned is likely illegal but that still drew 35 Democratic votes in the House and one in the Senate (Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), in the tradition of Detroit's John Dingell). It's a far cry from the bipartisan consensus that reigned when President Richard Nixon famously signed the Clean Air Act, which set federal air pollution levels for the first time but gave California permission to continue going further, owing to its decade-plus of vehicle emissions rules aimed at the smoggy Los Angeles basin. The automakers have been steadily lobbying against the rules since then, with a brief ceasefire from 2009-16, when ten automakers and the United Auto Workers signed a nonaggression pact in President Barack Obama's Rose Garden with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the EPA. That it happened at the same time that the federal government was taking an equity stake in General Motors was no coincidence, said Nichols, who helped broker the pact. "They saved them from bankruptcy," she said. California has less recourse this time around. Where Newsom signed deals in 2019 with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo to abide by the state's rules even in the event of federal cancellation, he now only has Stellantis, which signed a separate agreement last year that goes through model year 2030. And several of the state's allies are peeling off. California had 12 other states signed on to follow its lead as of last year, but it now has 10, after Republican-led Virginia dropped out and Vermont delayed enforcement by 19 months. And Democrats are getting cold feet, too: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed an executive order in April delaying enforcement, and Democratic lawmakers in New York introduced a bill this year to delay their participation by two years. (California and the other 10 states immediately sued Thursday to preserve the emissions standards.) "If it was only California, I think [automakers] wouldn't have been as eager to jump in on the federal level and work with the Republicans, but it's the fact it's the other states that had the California standards that were killing them, especially New York," Nichols said. That echoes the automakers' argument. "The problem really isn't California," John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a statement after the Senate's vote last month to overturn the rules. "It's the 11 states that adopted California's rules without the same level of readiness for EV sales requirements of this magnitude."
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
No More Student Visas? No Problem.
Just how mad is Beijing about President Donald Trump's decision to revoke student visas for Chinese nationals? Not as mad as it says, and not as mad as one might expect. Publicly, China's leadership will likely complain that Trump's action is yet another attempt to thwart the country's rise. But in reality, Beijing would probably just as soon keep its smartest kids at home. Late last month, the U.S. State Department announced that it would 'aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,' and that it would 'enhance scrutiny' of the applications it received in the future. The new visa policy, a spokesperson said, is meant to prevent China from exploiting American universities and stealing intellectual property. A spokesperson for the foreign ministry quickly registered Beijing's objection to the new policy. But when Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke with Trump by phone last week, either he didn't raise the new visa policy or his foreign ministry didn't regard his comments on the matter worth including in its official summary of the call, which suggests that the issue is not a top priority in Beijing's negotiations with Washington. One reason for this underwhelming response may be that re-shoring its university students serves Beijing's current agenda. China first opened to the world in the 1980s; in the decades that followed, securing a Western education for its elite helped the country bring in the technology and skills it needed to escape poverty. China was 'sending people out, learning from other places, finding the best quality wherever it was, and bringing that quality back to China,' Robin Lewis, a consultant for U.S.-China education programs and a former associate dean at Columbia University, told me. Now that period has given way to one of nationalism and self-reliance, which means promoting China's own companies, products, technologies—and universities. Rose Horowitch: Trump's campaign to scare off foreign students Xi has consistently stressed the importance of education in sustaining China's rise. His government has invested heavily in China's schools and lavished resources on science and technology programs, with some success. Some of China's top institutions, such as Tsinghua University in Beijing, have gained international recognition as serious competitors in scientific research. China would like to have its own Harvards, rather than sending its elite students to the United States, for political and cultural reasons as well as economic ones. Chinese authorities have long worried that the hundreds of thousands of students it exports to America will absorb undesirable ideas about democracy and civil liberties—and that they will access information about China that is suppressed at home, such as the story of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In fact, many young Chinese who study in the United States seem to enjoy American freedoms and seek to stay rather than return to serve the motherland. Beijing has tried to deal with this in part by monitoring the activities of its students in the U.S. and attempting to hold them firmly to the party line, including by harassing the families back home of those who stray. Within China, authorities can more easily confine students inside the government's propaganda bubble, which in recent years has become more airtight. Domestic media seek to portray the U.S. as unsafe, especially for Asians, by highlighting incidents of racial discrimination, violence, and disorder. One story published last year by the state news agency Xinhua, under the headline 'Chinese Students' Dreams Turned Into Nightmares at U.S. Doorstep,' tells the harrowing tale of a Chinese student detained and deported at an airport and claims that others had suffered the same fate. China's top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, warned Chinese students at universities abroad against being recruited as foreign agents, and told of one such unfortunate national who was discovered and punished. Even before Trump's announcement, this climate of mutual distrust had led to a drop-off in Chinese students enrolled in American universities. The number had reached an all-time high during the 2019–20 academic year, topping 372,000, according to the Institute of International Education. But that figure has fallen since—by a quarter, to 277,000, in the 2023–24 academic year. Now India, with more than 331,000 enrolled, sends more students to American institutions than China does. The Trump administration appears to believe that curtailing Chinese access to American technology, money, and, in this case, education will give the U.S. the edge over its closest competitor. In some areas, this might work: Restricting the export of advanced U.S. semiconductor technology to China seems to have helped hold Beijing's chip industry back. So why not do the same with higher education? A case can be made that keeping Chinese students out of some of the world's top research institutions will hold back their skills acquisition and, with it, the country's progress. Adam Serwer: Trump is wearing America down In practice, though, the effect of this policy could be hard to gauge. The engineers behind the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, which wowed Silicon Valley by developing a competitive chatbot on the cheap, were mainly locally trained. And the skills that Chinese students can't find at home they can seek in any number of places. There may be only so many Harvards, but Chinese students can receive a good education—and a warmer reception—in countries other than the United States. Universities in Japan and Hong Kong are already trying to capitalize on Trump's harassment of international students to lure them. The idea that any American policy can effectively dampen Chinese ambition may be far-fetched. 'People wake up in the morning and it's all about education here. There is nothing more important,' James McGregor, the chair for China at the consulting firm APCO, told me. 'You're going to stop Chinese people from learning the top skills in the world? No. They'll just deploy them somewhere else.' For now, the Trump team can't seem to decide whether it wants to get tough on China or make deals with China, and the new student-visa policy reflects this confusion. 'Chinese students are coming. No problem,' Trump said in a briefing after his call with Xi. 'It's our honor to have them, frankly.' China's leadership surely knows that many Chinese families still aspire to send their young-adult children to American universities. But Beijing is much more single-minded than Washington about the future of relations between the two countries: Xi appears to see Washington as the primary impediment to China's rise, and ties to the U.S. as a vulnerability best eliminated. From that viewpoint, relying on Harvard to train China's most promising students is a national-security risk. That means that Trump may be doing Xi a favor.
