Not for nothing, but my old office overlooked the Port of Charleston in good ol' South Carolina. There were an awful lot of BMW X5s being shipped out of that port on a daily basis. To underscore that, my German professor, a former VP at several German multinationals would always trot out that one in five jobs in the state comes either directly or indirectly from German corporations running factories and operations out of the state. I'm sure it isn't out of the goodness of their Teutonic hearts.

My understanding is that the core of german industry is the mid-size manufacturers, not the multi-national megacorps. Fortune-50 type companies are in a class of their own.

I love South Carolina, but it seems like a particularly lousy place to be an industrial worker to me.

daimler is a multinational conglomerate, not simply a german company. globalisation yadda yadda yadda

+likely difference in the cost of manufacturing/assembling locally vs. Importing (if at all possible) with duties slapped on top.

Labor is a tiny part of modern car assembly. Robots and machines are used everywhere. Avoiding/reducing currency risk is a major motivator - you want production costs to be in same currency as sales.

In the case of the BMW X5s, all of the ones going through the port are destined for Europe, South America, and Asia.