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% 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 102,000 cars to the US in 2024.
“The worst thing what can happen to a running business is the announcement of lower tariff,” 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 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Britain’s biggest automotive employer, to announce the trade deal. JLR said on Tuesday that the announcement “brings greater certainty for our sector and stakeholders” but added that it still needed “the detail of the trade deal”.
JLR would have been among the most affected by the tariffs, and executives were on the verge of imposing 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.
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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.
