After two years of Covid lockdowns, a global chip shortage, the war in Ukraine, soaring commodity prices and a looming recession, you would be forgiven for thinking the UK car industry has quite enough on its plate.
But in the past few months, a new problem has appeared on the horizon: the risk of a trade war between the European Union and the UK as Brexit flares up again. And the car industry, probably correctly, fears that it could be on the front line if the worst comes to the worst.
Although there have been rumblings of a dispute centred on the Northern Ireland Protocol since last year, it was the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam who uncovered the deep concern of the car industry.
Islam revealed that Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess had been in discussions with the British ambassador in Berlin.
He quoted Diess as saying: "There's a lot of communication going on. And there's also a dependency. We have a British brand, Bentley, which is doing extremely well. Also the UK is our biggest export market in Europe for the premium brands for Volkswagen and Audi. So I think there will be, let's say, a mutual interest now to keep [trade] open.,
"We will try to calm down the situation between France and the UK as much as possible, because I believe that only [Russian president Vladimir] Putin and our enemies will be happy with yet another disagreement between such close partners as the UK and the EU."
Clearly, the possibility of tariffs being added to certain manufactured goods being exported from the UK, and then the possibility of the UK retaliating in kind, is now high on the automotive’s industry’s agenda, even though no other brand bosses have yet gone public about their concerns.
So what exactly might happen to the car industry if the negotiations break up without agreement?
In recent years, former US president Donald Trump took part in a trade war with both France and Germany, partly because the World Trade Organisation gave both the US and France permission to extend new tariffs on each other as the result of the long-running dispute between aircraft makers Airbus and Boeing.
Manufactured goods heading to the US that incurred higher customs duties of between 10 and 25% included aircraft components and even whiskey, cheeses and olives. There's also something called carousel retaliation, whereby these tariffs change to different products every six months.
And there's general agreement that any kind of automotive tariffs - along with fishing-related products - would be in the front line in any UK-EU trade dispute.
One of the problems for EU-based car makers is that the UK is a very significant market for European vehicles, especially German-branded cars – hence Diess’s concerns.
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