Is Imported Car Insurance More Expensive?

The Global Parts Supply Chain — and a 2025 Tariff

Once a claim is filed, severity comes down to one figure the collision-repair industry calls the Total Cost of Repair, or TCOR: the full dollar amount on the finished body-shop invoice. CCC Intelligent Solutions, the claims-data provider a claims-data and collision-repair-industry provider, tracked the average U.S. TCOR at roughly $4,500 in 2023, climbing past $4,730 by the end of 2024.^[9]

Replacement parts are the single largest driver of that bill for imported vehicles. A body-shop estimator can specify genuine Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) parts, made by the vehicle’s own manufacturer, or cheaper third-party aftermarket parts. For many high-end imports, the production volume is too low for an aftermarket supplier to profitably copy the part at all, so the shop has no choice but to order the genuine part from Germany, Japan, Italy, or South Korea and pay the international freight that comes with it.

That built-in shipping penalty was sharply amplified by trade policy. In May 2025, the federal government imposed a 25% tariff on assembled imported vehicles and a separate 25% tariff on certain imported auto parts.^[13] Because a tariff is calculated as a percentage of the part’s price, it adds the most raw dollars to parts that were already the most expensive — the genuine imported components a domestic model rarely needs. CCC Intelligent Solutions’ own tracking showed average collision-estimate part prices accelerating through 2025: up 4.4% year-over-year in the spring, 5.0% in June, and 6.6% by July, as distributors worked through their remaining pre-tariff inventory.^[11] An Automotive Body Parts Association industry estimate projected that the tariffs on imported auto parts would translate into premium increases of roughly $35 to $120 per vehicle, passed from the repair shop to the insurer and finally to the policyholder.^[11]

General consumer inflation did not move nearly as fast as auto-repair inflation over the same period, which is exactly why an imported vehicle’s premium gap widened rather than held steady. The table below lines up the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ broad Consumer Price Index against its narrower vehicle-repair categories.

An industry survey by the Automotive Body Parts Association (ABPA), a trade group representing aftermarket parts makers, found 75% of surveyed consumers reported higher collision-repair bills and 44% reported delays tied specifically to parts availability. The ABPA argues that when a shop cannot access a cheaper aftermarket alternative — which is common for imported models — repairs move slower and cost more, directly raising claim severity.^[11] Treat that figure as an interested industry association’s survey finding rather than an independent government statistic; it is directionally consistent with the BLS and CCC data above, not a substitute for it.

Specialized Labor and OEM Repair Monopolies

Parts are half of a repair bill; labor is the other half, and imported vehicles pull disproportionately from the most expensive end of the labor market. The Collision Repair Education Foundation estimates the U.S. industry is short roughly 30,000 trained technicians a year, a shortage severe enough that shops must raise hourly labor rates simply to retain the technicians they have; claims data showed average labor rates rising 4.5% in 2024 and another 3.1% in the first half of 2025.^[10] Repairing an imported luxury vehicle often demands manufacturer-specific certification: technicians must be trained to weld boron-alloyed steel and aluminum, and to work safely around a high-voltage electric-vehicle battery pack. Shops report that technicians holding those advanced certifications command a 20% to 35% wage premium over the industry baseline.^[14]

Several import brands go a step further and restrict who is even allowed to buy their structural parts. Manufacturers including Mercedes-Benz and Porsche run Certified Collision Repair Programs that require a body shop to purchase brand-specific diagnostic equipment, send technicians to factory training, and follow exact factory repair specifications before the shop is permitted to order structural frame parts from the manufacturer at all.^[7] A driver who crashes a certified-program vehicle and takes it to an uncertified independent shop is not choosing a cheaper option; that shop is not authorized to buy the parts needed to fix the frame. The result is localized repair-labor scarcity: because only the certified shop can do the job, the certified shop can charge more for it, and the insurer has no alternative but to pay that rate. Actuaries can build the higher expected severity of that outcome into the vehicle’s physical-damage rating symbol before a single claim is ever filed.^[5]

ADAS Turns a Cheap Bumper Repair Into an Expensive One

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) — the network of cameras, radar units, and ultrasonic sensors behind automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and lane-departure warnings — arrived earliest and most densely on imported luxury models. ADAS genuinely reduces how often those vehicles crash. It also creates a real economic paradox: fewer crashes, but a much higher repair bill for the crashes that still happen.

A light rear-end tap in an older domestic sedan might mean swapping a plastic bumper cover for a few hundred dollars. The identical tap in a modern imported SUV also destroys the radar module mounted behind that same bumper, and the shop cannot simply bolt in a replacement. The Inter-Industry Conference on Auto Collision Repair (I-CAR), the industry’s technical-training body, specifies that a sensor recalibration is required after nearly any meaningful collision or structural adjustment — not just a broken sensor, but also routine bumper removal, windshield replacement, suspension repair, and even a standard wheel alignment, because any of those changes the sensor’s exact geometric relationship to the road.^[15]

I-CAR distinguishes two calibration methods. Dynamic calibration uses a diagnostic computer while the vehicle is driven under specific road, speed, and weather conditions until its software relearns the lane markings. Static calibration is the more expensive of the two: the vehicle sits on a level shop floor under controlled lighting while technicians position physical geometric targets at exact measured distances from the bumper.^[15] Both require equipment and training that a shop must pay to acquire, a cost that is ultimately billed to the insurer. CCC Intelligent Solutions found that by early 2025, roughly 87% of repair appraisals already included a digital diagnostic scan and 32% required a full calibration, and it projects the glass- and ADAS-calibration segment of the collision-repair market to grow at a 10.15% compound annual rate through 2035, the fastest-growing repair category tracked.^[14] Imported vehicles, which tend to carry the densest and most interconnected sensor networks, sit at the expensive end of that growth curve.

The Electric Vehicle Total-Loss Problem

Many of the most popular electric vehicles sold in the United States are imported or built on heavily imported battery and drivetrain platforms, which pulls the EV pricing story directly into the imported-insurance discussion. Verisk’s own actuarial comparison of EV and internal-combustion loss data found EVs have a better liability record than gas vehicles — fewer bodily injury and property-damage claims, likely reflecting both crash-avoidance technology and driver demographics — but a higher physical-damage claim frequency once the vehicle itself is the thing getting repaired.^[16]

The mechanism runs through the battery pack. Repairing an EV after a collision requires strict high-voltage safety protocols before a technician can even touch the vehicle, which adds labor time on its own. If the crash even slightly compromises the structural battery tray, the manufacturer commonly requires the entire high-voltage pack be replaced rather than repaired, to rule out a future fire risk.^[14] Because that battery pack is one of the single most expensive components in the vehicle, this pushes many moderately damaged EVs past their economic-repair threshold and into a total loss instead of a repair. U.S. total-loss rates reached 20.5% of all claims in 2024, up from 17.8% in 2019.^[14] Every total loss means the insurer writes a check for the vehicle’s full value instead of paying a smaller repair bill, and insurers price that elevated total-loss risk into the premium before the crash ever happens. Readers weighing whether to drop physical damage coverage entirely on an older vehicle, imported or not, may find our companion research on whether a used car still needs full coverage insurance useful, since it covers the same Actual Cash Value and total-loss-threshold math from the other direction.