We spoke with 100 sourcing and procurement professionals at large automotive companies, from category leads to vice presidents, all working below the C-suite where supplier decisions actually get made. The picture is consistent across every account. Small teams are running enormous, multi-tier supplier networks under constant tariff and regulatory pressure, with resources that have stayed flat or shrunk since 2025. Most can see no further than their direct suppliers and the single tier beneath them. When leadership asks how exposed the company is to tariffs or to China, the honest answer for most is that it takes weeks to find out, if they can find out at all.
Respondents were recruited account by account from a defined list of 60 large automotive accounts: OEMs such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and General Motors, alongside their major Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers. The 100 completed responses break down across those accounts as follows.
Every engaged account and its completed-response count. The remaining 21 accounts on the target list returned no completes in this wave.
Automotive supply chains are among the most complex in the world, and the teams running them are small. A typical respondent sits on a team of six to fifteen people accountable for hundreds or thousands of direct suppliers and tens of thousands of distinct parts. The 2025 tariff upheaval added work at every turn, and the resources to absorb it have not followed.
Seven in ten teams are doing more with the same or less. Only 7% have seen budget and headcount grow significantly since 2025, while 71% report resources that are flat or shrinking. The footprint each person covers keeps expanding even as the team does not.
The most consistent finding in the study is how little of their own supply chain these teams can see. More than three quarters can trace suppliers no further than the tier directly beneath their direct suppliers. Tier 3 and below, where a large share of country-of-origin and forced-labor risk hides, stays mostly dark.
When teams do map a critical product all the way to raw materials, they routinely find suppliers they never knew were there. Among the 62% who have completed or started an end-to-end map, the exercise surfaced an average of 38 previously unknown sub-tier suppliers, and it typically took four to six months of manual work to produce.
Since the 2025 tariff changes, supplier cost negotiations have become almost continuous. Three quarters of respondents say more than one in ten of their suppliers has requested a price increase citing tariffs. The harder problem is that almost none of them can check whether the claim holds up.
Suppliers are citing tariffs far faster than procurement can verify them. While 75% of respondents see tariff-justified increase requests from more than 10% of their suppliers, 52% can independently verify the impact for one in ten of those claims or fewer. The same blind spot appears with China: of the 77% asked to quantify total China exposure in the past year, just 14% could answer within days.
On top of tariffs, the compliance load keeps growing. The average respondent personally owns several overlapping regulatory frameworks, from forced-labor rules to conflict minerals to EV battery sourcing requirements. The tooling to handle it stays fragmented, and AI is still mostly an experiment.
Conflict minerals (71%) and forced-labor rules under UFLPA (64%) are now near-universal responsibilities, with newer EV and EU frameworks climbing fast. Most teams carry this on spreadsheets: 92% still rely on Excel for supplier mapping and risk work, and 72% are either not using AI at all or only piloting it. When we asked what would unlock budget for a better approach, the answer was almost always the same. A number leadership is already asking for, that the team cannot yet produce.
Verbatim responses from across the account base, spanning sourcing, supply chain risk, and compliance functions.
"We can name our direct suppliers in our sleep. Ask me who is three tiers down on a safety-critical part and I'm starting a two-month project, not answering a question."
Supply Chain Risk Manager · Tier-1 Supplier"Every new forced-labor rule lands on my desk with the same instruction: make sure we are clean. Nobody asks whether I have the data to prove it. I usually don't."
Supply Chain Compliance Lead · Automotive OEM"A supplier says tariffs and adds a number. Pushing back means proving the country of origin myself, and most weeks I can't, so we either eat it or we argue blind."
Senior Manager, Sourcing · Tier-1 Supplier"When the board asked for our total China exposure, it took my team three weeks and a page of caveats. I don't want to send that email again."
Director, Supply Chain Risk · Automotive OEM"Two new EU frameworks this year, the same headcount. The honest answer is that we triage. Some obligations get real attention, and some get a spreadsheet."
Manager, Supply Chain Compliance · Tier-2 Semiconductor"I don't need another dashboard. I need to walk into the quarterly review already holding the exposure number, before anyone asks me for it."
VP, Global Sourcing · Automotive OEMEvery finding in this report traces back to one root problem. Teams cannot see far enough down their own supply chains to answer the questions that tariffs, China, and regulators are now asking. Altana builds a living model of the global supply chain that maps your products past Tier 1 to the sub-tier suppliers, country of origin, and raw materials beneath them, so the exposure numbers leadership wants are ready before they ask.
See what's under your supply chainAn account-based study of automotive sourcing and procurement professionals, recruited company by company from a defined list of large OEMs and Tier-1 / Tier-2 suppliers.
All figures are reported as a percentage of the 100 completed responses. Single-select questions sum to 100%. Multi-select questions (regulatory frameworks, tools in use) allow more than one answer and therefore sum to more than 100%. This is a sample report built on illustrative synthetic data to demonstrate format and analysis. The numbers are fabricated for design purposes and do not represent fielded survey results.