This is the second part in a series on discerning which new vehicle would be best for our family.
One of the things I’ve always insisted is that I will only buy American cars. I was shocked when my husband, who can be even more adamant about buying American than me, disagreed. He countered that there are no cars that are truly and fully made here, and it’s not like we’d be supporting any small independent businesses by buying American (while you can find other big purchases such as furniture that are handcrafted, no one builds cars from scratch)… so why bother? I was mystified.
Another time one of my friends from grad school, a Texan through and through, mentioned her truck being American-made, and I was even more confused – she drove a Toyota! When I asked for clarification, she simply explained that there was a Toyota factory near her hometown – she felt that her truck provided jobs to her community.
Turns out it’s much trickier to figure out which car is American than just assuming you’re okay with a Chevy. In fact, according to Cars.com’s popular American-Made Index, the most American car of 2011 was actually a Toyota Camry.
No, that was not a typo. The article is informative, so I do encourage you to read it if you’re interested in this stuff. However, I have one major qualm with how they go about creating their list: they include vehicle sales as a factor. Their rationale is that more vehicles creates more jobs, but I really don’t think that popularity is any indicator of how American a car is. What’s worse, as this flag-waving blogger points out, is that they don’t reveal their methodology. This means we don’t have any idea of the weight that they assign to this factor.
But it turns out you don’t actually need an online dealership to figure out how American a car is. The NHTSA freely publishes this information for every car sold in the USA. You can get a pdf right here.
The two things you want to look at are Percent US/Canada, which is how much of the parts are produced in the USA and/or Canada (they don’t split the countries up) and Final Assembly Countries, which is where the vehicle is actually put together. And if you don’t want to scan through the full list, you can actually see the percent of domestic content (I believe listed as AALA) on the sale sticker at the dealer.
Here’s what the top of the list looks like – those model year 2012 vehicles with more than 75% domestic content. (Click to enlarge.)
You may have noticed a few of those vehicles are assembled in Canada, and you probably noticed some of those companies aren’t American-owned. For someone who is adamant about buying a vehicle from one of "the Big Three," this isn't exactly the list you’re looking for.
I don't think it's enough to just buy something from GM, Ford, or Chrysler, though. In my opinion, a vehicle shouldn’t get a lot of "made in the USA" credit if most of its parts come from another country but it happens to sport an American company’s logo.
In my opinion, a good American-made score would value domestic (US/Canada) content at 40%, country of assembly at 40%, and country of manufacturer at 20%. And because I’m a nerd, I went ahead and did the math for you. I included all cars with 70% or more domestic content, and plugged each one into this equation:
Without further adieu, I give you my own list of the top domestic cars of 2012.
The Truly Most American Vehicles of 2012
That has the Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana tied for first at 92.8% American, followed by the second-place tie of Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator at 92%. The Chrysler 200 Convertible is at third with 91.6%. There is a four-way tie for fourth (90.4%) between GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, Jeep Liberty, and Chevrolet Traverse. Another four-way tie occurs for fifth place (90%) between Chevrolet Corvette, a variety of Ford F-Series, and Chevrolet Malibu. The Dodge Avenger comes in at sixth place (89.6%) and the Chrysler 200 Sedan is at seventh (89.2%). As you may have noticed, there's not that much variation among the final American-made index numbers, though there is a 10% difference along the domestic content lines.
As it turns out, you'd get the exact same chart if you took the original list and got rid of any that were made by a foreign country or assembled outside of the United States. Still, I was a bit surprised that the top 2 Toyotas didn't make the cut, with their large percentage domestic content. Perhaps my scoring is a bit stringent, but I think it's pretty appropriate if you're really striving for the most American vehicle possible.
Of course, not everyone cares about just how American their car is. How important is buying an American car to you?