FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) - The Trump administration is launching a 25% tariff on auto imports Thursday, which means current sticker prices won’t stick. “You’re looking at $4,000-$15,000 increases on the sticker of the vehicle,” Lithia Hyundai General Manager Moose Pohyar said. Pohyar says he has been preparing his team and bracing for the impact for months. “We've ordered several cars in advance just to be able to price lock and protect a lot of our inventory for our consumers,” Pohyar said. He says they have enough inventory to sell price-protected cars for a few more months, but after that, prices will rise exponentially. “This policy is clearly going to raise prices and it's probably going to raise prices by quite a bit. And when we think about automobiles, it's raising prices on an item that virtually everyone purchases,” UC Merced Economics Professor Greg Wright said. Wright says the goal is to incentivize companies to move their operations to the United States and create jobs. He doesn’t think it will be worth it in the long run, though. “Any of the kind of gains in terms of, you know, several thousand jobs perhaps, are going to be more than offset by the drastic increase in prices that we're going to see over the next few years,” Wright said. No one is going to feel the impact more than Pohyar, though, and he is still on board with Trump’s plan. “It's going to be a little bumpy in the beginning, right, but as long as we weather it, and the businesses here like ourselves, we work with our consumers and get through this, ultimately, it's going to be a great benefit,” Pohyar said. Wright says one potential consequence of these tariffs could be other countries retaliating against the U.S. and placing tariffs on our agricultural exports. YourCentralValley.com will watch the actual impacts closely over the next several months. ...read more read less