This is not a criticism of those manufacturers. It is an explanation of how the world works, and why the flag on a car's badge tells you almost nothing about where the car was made.
The number on the sticker
Since 1994, the American Automobile Labeling Act has required every new car sold in the United States to display on its window sticker the percentage of its components sourced from the US and Canada, and the location of its final assembly. The data is public. It is on every Monroney sticker in every dealership in the country. Most buyers do not read it.
If they did, they would find the following. The Ford F-150, the bestselling vehicle in America for 48 consecutive years and a vehicle that functions as a cultural symbol of American industrial identity, has 45 per cent domestic parts content according to the NHTSA's own data. Less than half of it, by value, comes from the country it represents. The Chevrolet Corvette, assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, fares better, but its supply chain still crosses multiple borders. The Jeep Grand Cherokee, one of the most identifiably American nameplates in the world, is assembled in Detroit but sources components globally.
Meanwhile, the Honda Accord is built in Marysville, Ohio, the Honda Odyssey in Lincoln, Alabama, the Toyota Camry in Georgetown, Kentucky. These vehicles, built by Japanese companies, consistently rank among the most domestically sourced vehicles available in the American market.
Cars.com's 2025 American Made Index, which has tracked these numbers for 20 years, found that the average domestic parts content among its top ten most American vehicles was 70.3 per cent, down from 83.4 per cent in 2006. The direction of travel is consistent and has been for two decades.
How it happened
The short version is: NAFTA, signed in 1994, created a trade zone across North America free of tariffs that made it economically irrational for any manufacturer to ignore Mexico as a production location. Labour costs in Mexico run a fraction of those in Michigan or Ohio. The border became, for practical purposes, a line on a map rather than a customs checkpoint. General Motors and Ford both moved substantial production south within years of the agreement taking effect.
The longer version involves the structure of the global automotive industry that emerged after the Second World War. Japanese manufacturers began exporting to the United States in the 1960s and faced mounting political pressure in the 1980s as their market share grew and American factories closed. The response was voluntary export restraints and, crucially, a decision by Honda, Toyota and Nissan to build factories in the United States. Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama became the American home of Japanese manufacturing. Those factories were built partly to deflect political pressure and partly because the American market was large enough to justify local production. The result was that foreign brands became American employers while American brands became global sourcing operations.
The tariff era
The political response to all of this arrived, after years of discussion, in the form of the tariffs that took effect in 2025. The Trump administration's automotive tariffs, targeting imports from outside the USMCA free trade zone, created sudden and severe pressure on manufacturers whose supply chains crossed the relevant borders. The intent was to bring production back to the United States.
What tariffs cannot easily undo in months is what three decades of supply chain integration built. A gearbox manufactured in Mexico for a Ford assembled in Michigan is connected to that vehicle by tooling, logistics agreements, labour contracts, and engineering specifications that do not dissolve because a tariff rate changes. 70 per cent of buyers in 2025 said they were considering domestic content when making purchasing decisions, specifically to avoid tariff costs. The market is responding. Whether the supply chains can respond at the same pace is a different question.
Like this? Get the app: iOS | Android
What "American" actually means
There are several ways to answer the question of whether a car is American, and none of them are wrong, which is part of the problem.
Assembly location is the most straightforward. A vehicle assembled in the United States supports American workers at that plant. BMW's factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina employs thousands of Americans and is the single largest exporter of vehicles from the United States by value. It exports more cars than any American brand's domestic plant. By the logic of assembly location, a BMW X5 is more American than a Ford Maverick built in Hermosillo.
Parts content is the next layer. By this measure, a vehicle that sources 75 per cent of its components from American suppliers supports American parts manufacturers, engineers and material suppliers regardless of where final assembly happens.
Brand origin and corporate headquarters is the third layer, and the one most people use instinctively. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis are American companies in the sense that their corporate history, their headquarters and their largest management structures are American. Toyota is Japanese. But corporate nationality is a poor guide to economic impact, and it says nothing about where a specific vehicle was built or what percentage of it came from American workers.
No car sold in the United States is entirely made in America using only parts made in America. Not one single vehicle. This is not a recent development or a failure of policy. It is the structural reality of how a globally integrated industry functions. Steel comes from wherever steel is cheapest and most available. Semiconductors come from Taiwan. Rare earth materials for batteries come from the Democratic Republic of Congo and China. A car is a collection of several thousand components assembled from a supply chain that spans the planet, and that supply chain did not emerge by accident. It emerged because it was the rational response to decades of trade policy that rewarded it.
The question the label cannot answer
Buying a car with a high domestic content score is a legitimate way to direct economic activity toward American workers. It is not a guarantee that the money stays in the country, given that shareholders and executives of American companies are distributed globally, but it is a meaningful signal. The NHTSA domestic content data is accurate, accessible and updated regularly.
What it cannot tell you is what the car represents. The F-150 at 45 per cent domestic content is still assembled in Dearborn by American workers, powered by an engine developed by American engineers, sold by American dealers. The Kia EV6 at 80 per cent domestic content is a Korean design, developed in Seoul, whose Georgia factory opened in 2009 because the American market was worth building for.
Both of those things are true simultaneously. The question of which one is more American depends entirely on what you think the word means — and in 2026, with tariffs reshaping supply chains and manufacturers announcing new American facilities to capture government incentives, even the supply chain numbers will look different in five years than they do today.
The flag on the badge is the one thing that will not change.
Sources
- Cars.com American Made Index 2025 — 20 Years of Cars.com's American-Made Index (primary sourcing for domestic content rankings)
- US News & World Report — The Most American Cars on the Market in 2026
- US News & World Report — 10 Best Cars Made in America in 2026
- AmericanCarBrands.com — Cars Made in the USA 2026 (NHTSA AALA data sourcing)
- MotorBiscuit — Only 1 Full-Size American Pickup Truck Isn't Made in Mexico
- NHTSA — American Automobile Labeling Act reports at nhtsa.gov/vehicle-safety/american-automobile-labeling-act-reports
