From Ford to Musk, the perils of trying to build a global auto empire

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Attempts to build a global auto empire hark back to the 1910s and 1920s, when Henry Ford set up factories in Britain and Germany for the Model T, and General Motors responded by buying foreign carmakers. A century later, this ambition remains at risk of being run off the road.

Tesla is in some ways the 21st century Ford. It has a first-mover advantage involving a disruptive new technology, a charismatic leader—Elon Musk—and the aim to manufacture globally. While it only opened its first Chinese and German plants in 2019 and 2022, respectively, it managed to split its revenues 50% in North America, 30% in Asia-Pacific and 13% in Europe last year, FactSet estimates show.

This still isn’t as diversified as luxury car brands such as BMW, but isn’t far from Toyota, the closest claimant to being a world-spanning auto leader. Given Tesla’s aim to venture closer to the mass market, these are good numbers. Yet, over the past three months, Tesla stock has nearly halved, partly because Musk’s role in the Trump administration—echoing Henry Ford’s own political forays—has created consumer backlash at home and abroad, leading European sales in particular to tank.

What threatens to send the already imperiled dream of a globalized carmaker to the scrapyard, however, are two deeper trends. One is protectionism. In China, such policies have long propped up domestic vehicles at the expense of Western manufacturers, in turn generating an outcry to have U.S.

and European officials bar them access to their own markets. Now President Trump is even threatening to place tariffs on the supply chains that American and European carmakers have spread across Canada and Mexico. At the same time, it has become clear