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Solihull, a market town in England’s West Midlands, is home to one of Britain’s largest car factories, run by the luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover.
The factory, a collection of low-slung gray buildings spread over 300 acres, does not tower physically over Solihull. But its influence here is vast. Nine thousand people work directly for Jaguar Land Rover, known as JLR, while many more are employed by its contractors.
So President Trump’s introduction of a 25 percent tariff on imported cars — which remains in place despite the pause on steep so-called “reciprocal” tariffs announced on Wednesday — has caused anxiety in this town of around 218,000 people.
JLR, which sells about a fifth of its cars in the United States, responded Saturday by announcing that it would pause shipments to the U.S. for the month of April. The company is one of Britain’s biggest car manufacturers and exported about 38,000 cars to the United States in the third quarter of 2024 alone.
In Solihull town center on Tuesday, Ben Slade, 42, said he and his family were watching the news with concern. “My brother-in-law works in the Solihull JLR, and I know how many cars they’ve got waiting to be shipped out to America,” Mr. Slade said. His brother-in-law had three children, he said, “so it’s a very nervy time for my sister. Lots of people are just making a bit of a joke about it in the usual British fashion, but I think everybody is nervous.”
The first Land Rover rolled off the production line in Solihull in 1948, and the town hosts the flagship plant for its successor, the Range Rover. At a barbershop a few minutes from the factory gates on Tuesday, Paula Burnham, the owner, said that many of her customers were JLR workers. As she spoke, trucks drove past loaded with gleaming new Range Rovers.
“Whenever anything happens around here and it affects JLR big time, all the other subsidiary companies tend to have to lose workers, which then has an impact for the wider community,” she said.
Ms. Burnham had just finished cutting the hair of a JLR employee, but he declined to speak on the record, citing an instruction by the company not to talk to the media.
As a business owner, Ms. Burnham said she understood why Mr. Trump had ambitions to boost American manufacturing. “I’m not a Trump supporter, but sometimes, very occasionally, I do think there are some things that he says that do make some sense for the United States — not for us — but for them,” she added.
But she expressed alarm about growing international instability and said she was “horrified” by the way Mr. Trump and his vice president berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during his February visit to the White House. “I wouldn’t want to be Keir Starmer,” she added, referring to Britain’s prime minister, who has spent weeks courting Mr. Trump and trying to avoid the imposition of tariffs. “Trump is such an arrogant man — he’s a loose cannon and you just don’t know what he’s going to do next.”
On Wednesday, the president announced a 90-day pause on the steepest trade tariffs he had set for countries around the world. But no change was made to the 25 percent rate on cars and parts imported by the United States, which was announced separately last month and came into force on April 2.
Mr. Starmer came to Solihull on Monday to give a speech about the British response to the tariffs, standing in front of a production line and warning of a new “age of insecurity.”
“We will keep calm and fight for the best deal with the U.S.,” Mr. Starmer said. “Car building has been our heritage — and we won’t turn our backs on it now.”
His government is in ongoing talks with the United States, in the hopes of reducing the 10 percent blanket tariff imposed on Britain or the 25 percent tax on cars.
If those negotiations fail to yield results, Mr. Slade worries about the knock-on effect on Solihull’s businesses if JLR starts making cuts. While he understood that Mr. Starmer “has to play nice” with Mr. Trump in the short term, he said, he believed that the government should be “exploring other options,” adding, “even if it means trading with countries that we deem suspicious, like China.”
“We need to do business with them because America can’t be relied upon,” Mr. Slade added. “Starmer is treating it like the special relationship still exists, but I don’t think it does. Trump is only out for Trump’s own interests.”
Norman Stewart, 60, a street performer playing a steel pan further down the street, called Mr. Trump’s tariffs “madness,” adding: “It’s causing chaos for everybody — Americans, non-Americans, even the penguins. I can’t really see the purpose of why he’s doing this, nobody is going to win.”
There are widespread concerns, in Solihull and elsewhere in Britain, that the economy will slip into recession. Sitting on a bench outside Greggs bakery, Julie Hickey, 58, recalled the closing of her father’s metalwork company during an economic slump in the 1980s. “A lot of those little factories have gone, so we’re reliant on the bigger places now,” she added.
She also felt that Mr. Starmer should react more aggressively to Mr. Trump. “I think he is a bit of a chicken, to be honest. He should be sticking up for the country — we’re an easy target these days.”
Sitting alongside her, Jean Stanley, 87, agreed with that assessment but saved her harshest criticism for Mr. Trump. “Every time he comes on the television, I turn it off — I can’t stand the man,” she said.
At the end of Solihull’s high street, a church spire overlooks a collection of Tudor buildings dating to the 15th century. Enjoying lunch in the sunshine outside a French brasserie, Dewi Johnson, a theater director, used a four-letter word to describe Mr. Trump. “I just don’t see the point in these tariffs, I don’t see the benefit at all,” he said. “Everyone’s saying it’s going to be like the 1930s crash. I’m 30 and in my lifetime, there have been three recessions. We don’t need another one.”
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