__Highlights:__

- 61 percent of car shoppers say the country where a vehicle is built isn’t important to them or that they were undecided.
- Just under a third of U.S. consumers said a vehicle being built in China would affect their decision to buy it; 49 percent said it would have no impact, while 21 percent said they were unsure.
- Build quality, impact on U.S. jobs and reliability were consumers’ primary concerns about Chinese-built vehicles.
- Roughly half of consumers said they were aware that brands like Cadillac, Buick, Volvo and soon Ford were building vehicles in China for the U.S. market.

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__Full story:__

Despite months of headlines about manufacturing moving out of the U.S., along with plenty of political rhetoric on the topic, a majority of U.S. car shoppers say the country where their vehicle is built doesn’t matter to them, according to a recent Autolist.com study. 

Sixty-one percent of consumers polled said the country where a vehicle was built wasn’t important to them or that they were undecided (53 percent said it didn’t matter; eight percent were undecided). The remaining 39 percent said it did matter where a vehicle was built.

![china country matter](https://www.autolist.com/6tuem73u73an/1SiT3tq9isS82s2MWUkykg/3147535df1481100446c26f9da76f49e/china_country_matter.JPG)

While vehicle production in Canada and Mexico has received the lion’s share of the attention recently, thanks largely to concerns about NAFTA, China is emerging as a key assembly location for automakers eager to get a slice of that country’s lucrative and sizable auto market. 

As a result, it’s also become financially advantageous to import some of those vehicles to the U.S. market.

Last year, Ford announced that it would build its next-generation Focus compact car in China instead of Mexico as it had originally planned. That model — dubbed the Focus Active and seen above — is expected to hit the U.S. market in the middle of 2019. 

Volvo — owned by the Chinese company Geely — and General Motors’ Buick and Cadillac brands also import vehicles built in China to the U.S. market. 

Consumers, for their part, seem unfazed by a vehicle being built in China. 

Forty-nine percent of car shoppers in Autolist’s survey said a vehicle’s Chinese assembly would have no impact whatsoever on their decision to buy it. Thirty percent of respondents said it would have some impact on their decision; 21 percent said they were unsure about the impact on their decision to buy.

When pressed on their main concerns about vehicles built in China, build quality was most cited, with 26 percent of respondents saying it would be their top issue. The impact on U.S. jobs was the second most cited concern with 20 percent; reliability was third with 14 percent. 

Awareness of Chinese-sourced vehicles in the U.S. market was split evenly among consumers, with 51 percent of respondents saying they were aware of brands like Volvo, General Motors and Ford’s Chinese-sourcing; 49 percent of consumers said they were unaware of this.

Autolist surveyed 1,264 car shoppers in May 2018 for this survey. 

Despite months of headlines and political rhetoric about U.S. manufacturing moving abroad, car shoppers in the U.S. are largely unfazed by what country their vehicles are built in -- good news for the growing number of Chinese-built vehicles coming here.

Origin story: Consumers unfazed by what country their vehicles are built in, poll finds

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