North America’s once mighty automotive tool-and-die industry has been waning for 30 years, with shops closing, workers retiring and the supply chain moving to Asia. Now the crisis has reached the point that American companies cannot “launch, redesign or refresh vehicles at scale” without Chinese tooling, according to a new white paper released by the Center for Automotive Research.
The preliminary research is based on interviews with automotive industry insiders in the past month. Among the findings:
In 2025, Taiwan, Vietnam and China combined supplied 88.2% of cutting tools and accessories imported to the U.S. China supplied 43.1% of industrial molds, more than double that of No. 2 Canada.
North America is no longer competitive with China in tooling.
The U.S. tooling industry has “deep structural problems,” that can only be solved with industry and government collaboration.
The decline in domestic tooling is both “a national security issue and an automotive competitiveness issue” for the U.S., the report states. Defense contractors use many of the same tooling manufacturers as the automotive industry.
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