The British luxury carmaker Bentley has said sales to the US remain frozen as customers wait for lower tariffs from the UK’s trade deal – with no sign yet of when the rates will start.
The UK last week agreed a 10% tariff on 100,000 car exports to the US as part of a limited trade deal with Donald Trump. That would be significantly below the 25% extra levy imposed by the US on the rest of the world, but neither government has yet detailed how the deal will work in practice.
Frank-Steffen Walliser, Bentley’s chief executive, said the wait for lower tariffs was “super-harming the business at the moment – nobody is moving”.
Manufacturers still have no idea when the lower tariffs will be implemented or how the 100,000 cars allowed into the US at the lower tariff will be shared out among UK carmakers. British manufacturers exported about 102,000 cars to the US in 2024.
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Britain’s biggest automotive employer, said on Tuesday it needed to find out if UK car parts would be subject to the lower tariffs and warned it lacked detail on complex rules of origin, which determine how cars qualify as British.
“The worst thing what can happen to a running business is the announcement of lower tariff,” Bentley’s Walliser said on Tuesday, at an automotive conference run by the Financial Times. “[It] means all your customers say: ‘Oh, no worries, I don’t buy a car now.’”
Bentley has kept prices steady since the tariffs were introduced, partly by rushing to ship more cars to the US before the levies kicked in, as well as running down existing stocks. That strategy is running out of time.
“We need the feedback within the next two, three weeks, to keep this going, Walliser said.
Keir Starmer visited JLR last Thursday to announce the trade deal. Adrian Mardell, the carmaker’s chief executive, told Tuesday’s conference: “The scale and sudden application of US tariffs on the auto sector, affecting, of course, both cars and parts, had an immediate and significant financial impact.”
JLR makes most of its models, including the Range Rover, in the UK. It still faces the extra 25% tariff, plus the 2.5% pre-Trump levy, on its Defender model, which is made in Slovakia. The EU has not agreed a trade deal with the US.
The company was one of the British manufacturers in line to be most affected by the tariffs before the trade accord was announced, and executives were considering steep job cuts to make up for declining sales. The UK’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, said the deal saved jobs at JLR that had been due to go within days.
Mardell said JLR had not planned “imminent” redundancies, and declined to say how many jobs might have been at risk without an agreement.
Before the tariffs, the company had otherwise been in good financial health. JLR said on Tuesday it made profits of £2.5bn in the financial year to the end of March. That was up 15% year on year and the best profit before tax in a decade, excluding exceptional costs.
JLR went through a difficult period at the start of the decade, with a series of strategic missteps, including expanding too quickly in China. However, the first three months of 2025 represented the 10th quarter of profit in a row.
Mardell said the US would be a growth market for JLR in the future, although he said the company had no plans to build cars in the US – the ultimate goal of Trump’s tariffs.
Other carmakers with EU factories are still struggling with the levies. Lynn Calder, the chief executive of Ineos Automotive, expressed frustration at the lack of a trade deal between the EU and the US. The chemicals conglomerate Ineos, owned by the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, opted to build its Grenadier off-roader in France, meaning it is still liable for 27.5% tariffs on a key market.
Calder said: “Where is Europe? I don’t know. Europe is as uncompetitive in every industry than it has ever been in my lifetime.”
