- This is a fun story, and this one,
(laughing)
it really plays to the American kind-of heart strings here,
and it's about a cars.com article that recently came out
stating, "What is the most American car?"
This is a study that they've published before,
and in this study, they basically look
at all the cars made, or the top 100 or something like that,
and then they try to rank them by which one
is the most American made, and with our current
political environment in the United States,
and if tariffs galore, trade war happening,
all these kind-of crazy things bubbling up,
who knows, how they can even keep up with what
is happening or what will be happening, it's insane.
This was, I thought it very interesting thing,
and I was really bummed on it
because Tesla's not even listed.
In fact, if you wanna look, hey, let's look up Tesla
and see how well they did, they're not
in the top 10 at all, and let's see,
okay, well, let's go look and research them,
okay, Smart, Subaru, Toyota, where are they?
So, cars.com, I don't know if intentionally
or unintentionally didn't even consider Tesla
in this study, it appears, 'cause when you look,
I mean, and they have all these kind-of other ones,
like Acura, obviously a Japanese brand,
Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley,
I mean, all of these here, the exception of Buick
on the list, are not even American brands,
and here you have Tesla, the only car manufacturer
in California, and as we'll see, the most American
car manufacturer there is, not even considered.
So, I don't know what's going on.
I reached out to them, I tried to figure out,
show me the data, I would love to see a full
breakdown, how you calculated it, how you figured this out,
why wasn't Tesla included?
You know, this got me going.
Anyways, this was kind-of my fun weekend read
and what I like to do in my free time,
and so, with that, it reminded me of an article in Time
that I covered last year, this was March of 2017,
where they actually ranked auto makers,
not individual autos, and you can see here,
surprise, surprise, the most American
car manufacturer, not make, not individual car,
but car manufacturer, was Tesla.
And the reason, now, these guys, the way they
did it is they look at general assembly.
Now, that doesn't speak for everything,
but Tesla, 100 percent of their cars
are assembled in Freemont, California, currently.
Obviously, that's gonna change over time,
but here you go, so there you go.
And they beat out Jeep by a large percentage.
I mean, look, you go 100 percent to 89, right?
A full 11 percent difference, then three, three, three,
then it's kind-of very tight.
So, they, this was 20-
Sorry, this data was from 2016.
This was published in March of 2017,
and so, where this data comes from first
is from the AALA, which is the American Automobile
Labeling Act, and this is the one where
what they do is they have the actual, Labeling Act
is about the parts and where they come from.
So, you can kind-of figure out the parts in a vehicle,
how many of them are American-made?
And that's one way of looking at this.
Then, the Kogod School of Business,
I think I'm saying that right, I don't know,
they have this made in America auto index,
and they actually take the AALA rating,
you can see that here, or I'll try to bring
that up a little bit better, and they have
a factor of whether or not you have a U.S. headquarters,
and then that gives them kind-of this rating here,
this TDC, their own rating that they use,
and they do it by make of every single car.
Not every single car in the world, obviously,
I believe it's the top 100 or something
that are sold in the United States.
So, me being me, doing what I do,
I pulled this data together
and I figured, let's go through it.
So, previously, we were looking at 2016 data,
now we're looking at 2017 data,
and you can see that the most American company,
most American car company overall is still Tesla.
Now, what I've done here is I look
at the actual average, because if you did a sum,
some of these manufacturers like Cadillac here
have 10 vehicles, GMC has four,
Lincoln has five, so if you did
a sum on this, it wouldn't make sense.
You have to do an average, and I'm using the TDC method.
That TDC calculation that you just saw there.
And so, you can see here that Tesla is at 75,
whereas the next one is at 70,
and then 68.32, 64, so it kind-of just goes down from there.
The least, in fact, I think all these guys
that are on the bottom are tied here.
Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini,
yeah, these are just completely zero,
like nothing made in America at all.
And then you can kind-of go from there.
So, by auto maker, not by individual car,
Tesla still leading the pack.
This will change as the get the new Shanghai factory.
Elon also eluded to a European gigafactory,
which would be in Germany, I believe is where
he was stating, although, things like that may change
in that they Tesla European headquarters
would still remain in the Netherlands.
But there you go, so this is kind-of by auto maker.
Now, if you do it by the AALA, which is just solely
on where are the parts from, not anything about where
is it assembled or any of those things,
but where did they get the parts from?
Tesla falls pretty far down to number nine,
and it's because the batteries
and things come from other countries.
Now, Tesla has stated they want to get all of this
from North America, however, it's unlikely,
or it's still kind-of questionable whether or not
they'll be able to do that, so, there you have it.
So, the AALA method ranks Chrysler as the highest
overall, Tesla at number nine, but when you take
into account things like where the stuff is assembled,
and the U.S. headquarters, yes or no,
you get Tesla coming out on the top,
which I think is the right way to look at things.
So then, I kind-of wanted to go deeper,
and I looked at, let's compare this pattern here,
and you can see kind-of as this TDC rank goes up,
so does the AALA number, and you can kind-of just see
this pattern of every vehicle here.
So, I'm gonna publish this data, it's already
on the website, but I'll put a link
to it in the description, you can kind-of see every
individual vehicle, and then the last thing
I wanted to look at here was the individual cars,
so the make and the model, which one is the most American?
And using the TDC method, you're looking
at the Buick Enclave, the Chevrolet Traverse,
et cetera, et cetera, Tesla's actually not super high
on this list, they're down and ranked at 40th,
or they're tied for 40th with a bunch of other folks
because of their parts coming from other parts of the world.
So, long story short, if anyone gives you crap
about not buying American or anything, you can rest assured
that Tesla undoubtedly is the most American car maker.
Other ones, of course, maybe employ more people,
and all these other things, so there's lots of different
ways you can kind-of slice that, but just percentage-wise
using some really solid logic from this Kogod
School of Business, it's pretty undeniable.
So, there's the data for you.
There's the story that I saw that it was trying to tell me.
I'm curious what you guys think about that.
Leave me a comment down below.