German car exports to the United States got reduced by almost 14% in the first three quarters of 2025, making it the hardest-hit branch of the European country’s industrial landscape, as it tries to find respite from the tariff onslaught launched by US President Donald Trump.
According to a Reuters report, under an agreement between Washington and Brussels, Uncle Sam has set a 15% baseline tariff on cars from Europe from August 1, significantly less than Trump’s initial rate of 25% on top of a 2.5% existing levy. However, this is proving to be too much to deal with for both Germany’s automobile and the broader engineering sector, with the latter witnessing a9.5% export decline in the first nine months of 2025.
Machinery exports have been made subject to a 50% American tariff on steel and aluminium products. The chemical industry, on the other hand, also saw exports to the country’s top export market decline by 9.5%, although the Reuters report said this could not be blamed solely on tariffs.
“Other factors are likely to have played a role in the case of chemical products, such as lower production in Germany due to higher energy prices,” it said.
Across all sectors, German exports to the United States were down 7.8% year-on-year over the three quarters, following average growth of nearly 5% in the comparable periods of 2016 to 2024.
“Since it must currently be assumed that US import tariffs will not return to pre-Trump administration levels in the foreseeable future, a significant recovery in German exports to the US is unlikely,” Samina Sultan, an Economist for European Economic and Fiscal Policy at the German Economic Institute (IW), told Reuters.
“For pharmaceutical and similar products, front-loading and possible diversion effects also help explain export growth, as these goods were exempt from US import tariffs for longer than other products (and some remain exempt even now). In key sectors, German exports to the US have thus been pushed back to levels seen in 2022 or even early 2019. Without the significant upswing in German exports to the US following the COVID-19 pandemic until Donald Trump’s re-election in fall 2024, the downturn would have been even more painful,” she noted.
As Uncle Sam’s import tariffs are unlikely to return to previous levels anytime soon, Samina said the development in the third quarter of 2025 may represent an approximation of the “new normal” for German exports to the world’s largest economy.
“This hits the already pressured German export model hard. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the development of German exports to the US has depressed the development of Germany’s global exports by 0.81 percentage points, whereas last year they still made a positive contribution to Germany’s global export,” she explained.
“For motor vehicles and parts, the negative development in exports to the US accounts for nearly half of the global export decline. Losses in the US market are also a key factor behind the overall 3.3% drop in German machinery exports worldwide. To a somewhat lesser extent, this also applies to chemical products,” the economist concluded.