For both foreign and domestic carmakers, the U.S. has become a more attractive place to assemble vehicles for sale in other countries for multiple reasons: currency exchange rates that effectively lowered U.S. labor costs, new free-trade pacts, high quality and available plant capacity.
We have compared the total landed cost to Chicago of labor, transportation, taxes, quality and inventory carrying costs for outsourced manufacturing in 4 countries: U.S., China, Cambodia and Brazil.