“If you look at ’08, ’09, because of the financial conditions—higher interest rates, people not buying cars—it was demand destruction. If you get to COVID, it was a shutdown. The chip crisis was all about balancing different models, a lot of start-stops in the factories,” Kotagiri said. “There’s announcements of [automotive] plants being shut down. And that’s just the beginning. I’m not being dramatic saying it’s all rolled into one. It’s a really complex situation. If someone has a great scenario plan for this, I would really like to know.”

Magna supplies parts to all the major carmakers. The company operates 341 facilities across 28 countries.

While the automakers themselves bear a larger burden than suppliers when it comes to moving materials across borders, Kotagiri said all parties suffer when costs increase for any member of the integrated automotive industry.

“There’s a lot that we do in all parts of the region. Our policy is looking at North America as a whole—the footprints of the [automakers] were set this way,” he said. “If volumes are reduced, it has an impact. How do you spread a cost you’ve already invested?”

Lack of clarity on when tariffs will be applied, what will be impacted, and material costs makes it even more difficult to plan production to fulfill contracts with automakers, Kotagiri said. He added that Magna is “at the table with the policymakers and hoping to have a clear objective in the long term.”

Reshoring production, meanwhile, would probably take much of Trump’s second term.

“To build a plant like that to be operational from breakdown to operation is somewhere in the range of two years. You’re talking about plants that are a million square feet. We’re not talking hundreds of millions—we’re talking in billions. It’s not a flip of the switch,” Kotagiri said. “If you’re looking at a policy objective—you need this much content, by this time, three years from now, seems like an addressable question. But we have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective.”