[kaftoy]

"Do you know how many German cars are sold in the UK each year?"

So what you are saying is that brits will stop buying German/EU cars? Where are they going to buy their cars from? It's not like UK has some meaningfull car making industry, they moved all factories away. Not everyone can buy an Aston Martin.

I think that as long as the price for an EU car will be just below the price for importing an equivalent car from US or Asia, brits will have no other choice but to buy from Germans, even with new taxes added.

[throwaway049]

BMW will become a slightly more premium option if there are higher taxes. Meanwhile asian-made cars (like mine) will likely occupy the same market position they did before. Depends on the strength of Sterling as well of course.

[junto]

That's unlikely. The current trade deal with countries like Japan, is direct with the EU powerhouse, not one single country like the UK. The size of the EU has a much stronger bargaining power than the UK can ever hope to achieve.

More importantly, your UK purchased Japanese car is most likely fabricated in a UK or EU factory. The UK factories exist simply because Japanese manufacturers then have direct access the the EU market without tariffs, and take advantage of the EU subsidies in order to set up and operate.

Those subsidies and tariff benefits just evaporated. The EU market for their vehicles is much larger than the UK. It now makes sense for them to move their final manufacturing inside the EU zone and out of the UK. Bye bye jobs. The only benefit is that the GBP devaluation buys more Euros, so if you still have a job in the UK after this, you can buy your Japanese European made car cheaper as an import from the EU.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-company-shares-reeling-aft...

[throwaway049]

I mostly agree but I think you have it backwards when you say a devalued GBP buys more euros. A weak pound makes it more expensive for me to buy an imported car.

[tonyedgecombe]

The UK makes about 1.6 million cars a year and exports about 1.2 million of them.

[_ph_]

The UK makes a lot of cars for the BMW corporation (Mini, Rolls Royce). Easy to see how at least the Mini production would move to other BMW plants, if any tax barriers get into their way. And I wonder where Tata, which owns another large chunk of the British car production would continue to manufacture in Britain.