Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV may keep making heavy-duty Ram pickups in Mexico, reconsidering a move President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted as validation for his America-first policies.
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Chief Executive Officer Mike Manley told Reuters in an interview that the company could continue to build the big trucks at a plant in Saltillo, plus start assembling them at a factory in Warren, Michigan, north of Detroit. He said the additional output may be needed to continue gaining market share.
“Moving the Ram HD to Warren from Mexico is our current plan of record,” Mike Keegan, a Fiat Chrysler spokesman, said in an email. “Of course, we always assess latest market and economic conditions when making significant industrial moves.”
About two months before he died and was succeeded by Manley, then-CEO Sergio Marchionne drew Trump’s praise during a visit of top auto company executives to the White House. The president called the late Fiat Chrysler chief “my favorite man in the room.” He tweeted about the company five times in January, when the Mexico-to-Michigan shift was announced.
Since then, the Trump administration has renegotiated a trade pact between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. While the revised Nafta accord, known as USMCA, requires an increased level of auto content to be sourced from the continent and to be made by workers earning higher wages, carmakers avoided the prospects of steep tariffs and disruption to supply chains.
Manley told Reuters that Fiat Chrysler needed to ascend to second place in the U.S. full-size truck market. The company trails Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. in full-size truck sales, though the Ram pickup has outsold GM’s Chevrolet Silverado each of the last two months.