Video: What Is the American-Made Index?

Meanwhile many automakers based overseas build cars in America. And to complicate matters more, final assembly doesn't tell the whole story of economic impact. A car may be built here but use lots of foreign parts, or come from an automaker that doesn't employ all that many Americans. Given automakers and their suppliers directly employ nearly one million Americans, shoppers concerned about economic impact should still want to get to the bottom of it. Since 2006, cars.com's American-made index has tried to do just that by ranking the most American cars built and bought here. Redesigned in 2017 and updated again in 2020, the index now ranks all cars that meet some basic criteria. Among the many factors in each model's values are the location of final assembly, the makeup of parts that go into the car, the countries of origin for the engine and transmission, and the U.S. factory workforce directly employed by each automaker. Cars.com's final list is exclusively limited to cars assembled in the United States, and it draws from our analysis of hundreds of thousands of cars, including in-person data gathered from nearly a thousand cars on dealer lots. Go to cars.com/ami for more.