“Many Americans consider where the products they buy are made, in hopes their purchase will contribute to the U.S. economy. While that might seem easy enough with a T-shirt, few items get as complicated as the set of wheels in your driveway,” said Cars.com. Sources for the AMI include data obtained from automakers and Cars.com’s analysis of hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the Cars.com inventory and in-person dealership audits on hundreds of new cars.

Why Some Vehicles Don’t Qualify for the American-Made Index
• Although automakers assemble some 125 light-duty nameplates in the U.S. for the 2023 model year, not all of them qualify for AMI rankings.
• Automakers are not required to submit AALA data for vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 8,500 pounds, an echelon that includes full-size vans, heavy-duty trucks and the like.
• What’s more, manufacturers that build fewer than 1000 cars in a given model year aren’t required to give percentages of U.S. and Canadian content.
• Due to insufficient data, the AMI excludes vehicles from either group.
• “We implement a few other disqualifiers beyond that: We don’t rank fleet-only vehicles, or vehicles slated for discontinuation after the current model year without a U.S.-built successor.
• We also exclude any vehicles for which we lack high confidence in the data therein, typically because they fall below minimum sales and inventory thresholds or aren’t yet on sale at the time of our research.
• Due to changes in methodology, results for the 2023 American-Made Index cannot be compared to results for the index’s prior generation, published from 2017 to 2019. The first iteration of the AMI ran from 2006-16.
• Editors and reviewers don’t accept gifts or free trips from automakers. The Editorial department is independent of Cars.com’s advertising, sales and sponsored content departments.