US trade pause a factor in 15% JLR sales fall

Jaguar Land Rover has said its sales have dropped by 15.1% over the three months to June, partly because of the threat of US tariffs.

The Coventry-based car manufacturer, which also has sites in Solihull and at i54 near Wolverhampton, paused shipments to the US in April after President Trump’s administration introduced new tariff plans.

It said the drop in sales was also partly due to the planned wind-down of older Jaguar models.

In April, the US government said it would launch an additional 25% tariff on car imports, but it later came to a deal with the UK and JLR restarted exports in May.

JLR said its retail sales were down by 94,420 units over the three months to June and wholesale sales dropped by 10.7% to 87,286 units compared with a year earlier.

The US said its tariff on car imports was intended to encourage more car production within the country.

The deal it reached with the UK was to introduce a lower 10% tariff for the first 100,000 UK-manufactured cars imported into the US each year.

UK cars imported to the US beyond this threshold will, however, face a 27.5% tariff.

The car firm said on Monday that wholesale sales in North America dropped by 12.2% year-on-year when it paused shipments.

However, wholesale sales in the UK saw a bigger fall, by a quarter, because of the “planned cessation of the legacy Jaguar models”.

Jaguar stopped selling new cars in the UK late last year to allow it to shift production to new electric models, which are set to go on sale in 2026.

At the time the import tariffs were first announced, Prof David Bailey of Birmingham Business School said one in four JLR cars were sent to the United States.

He said it was the premium and luxury cars which sold especially well there and the US was the second biggest market for the UK’s industry after the European Union.