So I’m confused. I believe the Big Three North American automakers have plants in Canada. But none are based there. So do you consider Canada to have domestic auto production or not?
Yes, Canada manufactures cars. They are American brands but they are still Canadian if they are made there.
In that case I have no idea what to make of the following post.
I was thinking about the classic autos actually designed and built in each country.
Some of those brands are still made. But many autos are manufactured & sold in country’s that are actually foreign brands.
Either way, the country where it’s manufactured still counts. A Ford manufactured in Canada is sold there and it’s a Canadian car.
New Zealand has no domestic car manufacture or assembly, and only some limited commercial vehicle manufacture (buses and custom van/truck). Everything else (new and second-hand) is imported.
Globalization has blurred some of the lines of nationalism when it comes to automobile manufacturers. For example, the majority of Toyotas sold in the US (over 70%) are built in the US. Some Toyotas, like the Tundra, are not only built in the US, but were also designed by Americans designers. In fact, the Tundra is not available for sale in Japan, except in the unofficial grey market. Does that make the car/truck American or Japanese? Hard to say.
Or, as one of the auto magazines once put it, “Who says stainless steel doesn’t corrode?”
Previous thread on the topic
The list is limited to non-military vehicles.
Denmark has Zenvo, though they don’t seem to be doing much at the moment.
Angola gave it a try in 2001 in a joint venture with VW, but not surprisingly it failed due to the usual corruption,
Yes practically speaking car making is a relatively bigger industry in Canada than say the US, in nominal final assembly output units of ‘anybody’s’ cars per capita. The top country by that measure is Slovakia, though only a tiny proportion of them designed by the locally hq’d K-1 Engineering. And there are a number of small strictly local outfits in Canada too.
Requiring the manufacturer to be locally hq’d wouldn’t necessarily shorten the list of ‘vehicle making countries’ drastically since there are often small high end, racing, tech start up, truck or bus making local companies in countries where major global manufacturers also have mass market car assembly plants and where that’s most of the volume.
There’s also the distinction between “manufacture” and “assembly.” BMW assembles cars in the US from (primarily) German-sourced parts. Toyota builds trucks in the US from US-made parts (as there’s no market outside North America for large pickups).