Ford Firing an 11 Year Employee Over a $1.95 Cookie is a Harbinger of On-Shoring American Auto Manufacturing

For 30 years, American auto factories did one thing reliably: they left.

Mexico, then Canada, then further...

But in a single week of news, over $5 billion worth of production decided to come home.

(That’s on top of $40 billion+ automakers pledged to reshoring last year.)

Most people will read the Toyota and BMW headlines as proof that tariff policy is working. 

But I’d argue that domestic auto manufacturing is only viable again because automation, software, and digital systems closed enough of the labor cost gap to make the math work.

> Toyota's San Antonio plant produced 197,506 vehicles in 2025 with more than 3,700 employees and over 5,600 supplier jobs on-site. The expansion adds a second assembly line and roughly 2,000 new hires by 2030. 

> BMW's number splits into $1.7 billion preparing Spartanburg for EV production and for a battery assembly facility in Woodruff.

The obvious logic is that automation lets a plant produce more products with fewer direct labor hours (which matters when your labor costs more than the offshore alternative).  Basically, wages stopped being the deciding line item. Uptime, defect rates, logistics, resilience, and speed to market decide who survives now.

To be fair, automation isn't doing this alone. Reshoring happens when several factors line up at once, like supply-chain risk, transportation costs, and policy (but that’s for another newsletter…)

Factory automation is also absolutely necessary because the clock on every new model launch is brutal. 

Meanwhile, GAC's Yichang plant in China produces a car body every 46 seconds on a heavily automated line, sitting on a vertically integrated EV and battery supply chain that shortens lead times and speeds up model changes. 

Nobody over there is debating whether to automate…

Take Ford, who botched the AI experiment very publicly. 

The automaker leaned on AI camera-based quality control inspections, which ultimately fell short of expectations.

So, Ford rehired 350 veteran engineers.

It’s proof that while the systems handle volume and consistency, the edge cases still belong to people with the institutional knowledge that no training LLM contains.

But then, in a bizarre turn, Ford fired a veteran employee over an alleged cookie theft! (Yes, I’m serious). An automated payment terminal failed to record an 11 year Ford employee’s purchase of a $1.95 cookie, and he was shit-canned. Once the employee showed his bank statement, the automaker scurried to win him back. But no dice. 

This fascinating clown behavior contradiction is a microcosm for the modern factory.

Automakers: The capital buys the building, but making it run at American cost levels means getting the automation, the supplier network, and the human oversight right at the same time.

Workers: The jobs that come back are not the same jobs that left. Some repetitive roles may shrink, while demand rises for engineers, technicians, maintenance staff, data-literate operators, and quality specialists. Experience becomes more valuable, not less. 

Suppliers: Final assembly coming home drags the whole local stack with it. Tighter speed, integration, and traceability requirements are now table stakes.

American auto manufacturing is entering a different phase.

The competitive advantage is moving toward companies that can combine three things: advanced automation, resilient supply chains, and people who know how to run increasingly complex systems.

Out with the old, and in with the new.

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