Industry Outlook
Detroit gathers plant leaders to plan for two futures
Looser fuel rules, shifting tariffs and new robots have left North American plants weighing futures they cannot yet price. AMNA, in Detroit on 21-22 October, is built around those choices.
Plant managers in North America are being asked to commit tooling today for vehicles that will still be on the line when the rules change again. That is hardly a new problem for an industry that plans in decade-long programmes, but the distance between the two plausible futures has rarely been wider. The finalised US fuel economy rule asks carmakers for gains of up to 1% a year, which lands the industry at roughly 34.9 miles per gallon by the 2031 model year, whereas the Biden-era path pointed to 50.4. A plant built for one of those worlds is not obviously useful in the other, as AMS explored when it examined how looser US fuel rules leave factories with hard choices.
Uncertainty is now part of the product plan
Electrification has not stopped, but it has slowed in ways that put real strain on balance sheets. EVs took 6.5% of new US vehicle sales in February, down from 7.4% across 2025 according to Edmunds, while 50% tariffs on US-Canada auto trade are unpicking assumptions that USMCA once made safe, a shift AMS has followed in its report on tariff turmoil in North American vehicle production.
Carmakers and suppliers are therefore trying to keep their options open rather than bet on a single outcome, which is easy to say and expensive to do.
The cheapest capacity is the capacity you cannot see
When capital is tight, the most attractive option is often the capacity a plant already owns but has never properly measured. In an AMS livestream on connected visibility, panellists cited a study suggesting that most manufacturers reach only 20-30% visibility of their shopfloor, and Adam Polcha of Daimler Truck North America argued that without a fuller picture of the business “you’re relying on people’s gut and their experience.”
The stakes rise as the next wave of automation arrives before these questions are settled, with two Figure 02 humanoids logging 1,250 hours at BMW’s Spartanburg plant and Hyundai planning 30,000 Atlas units a year by 2028, a gap between promise and practice that AMS weighed in Tesla’s humanoid claim meets the reality of the line.
Why a room in Detroit beats another report
None of these dilemmas has an answer that travels well in a simple press release, because the right choice depends on a plant’s vehicle mix, its brownfield constraints and the people who run it. That is the case for Automotive Manufacturing North America, which takes place at The Henry Hotel in Detroit on 21-22 October and has been built around these trade-offs rather than around product showcases.
On the first day a panel on cost and capex brings together Cyntia Perez of Ford Motor Company, Arun Prakash Mantena of Lucid Motors, Polcha and Marla Stern of Tenneco to discuss brownfield upgrades, retooling and maintenance.
On the second, Ford’s Rajeev Kalamdani explains how digital twins connect engineering models to live production data, Raman Mehta of Goodyear Tire & Rubber sets out how AI agents could speed decisions inside a manufacturing execution system, and Joseph McCabe of AutoForecast Solutions closes with a forecast to 2035 that takes in trade policy and electrification.
The programme then moves into interactive workshops and a closing session in which delegates agree where they might work together, with AMS staying in touch afterwards. Registration is open and the event is a little over a week away, so secure a place at AMNA and bring the decision you have been postponing, because someone else in the room is almost certainly postponing it too.
