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General Motors Co. says it will spend $144 million so that its Oshawa, Ont. assembly plant can build more kinds of the vehicle that has emerged as a sore spot in Canada’s trade war with the United States: pickup trucks.

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Today, suburban moms, executives, crunchy hikers and rural cowboys are all likely to drive a pickup, which has evolved far beyond its utilitarian roots, with price tags on new high-trim models often topping $100,000 and luxury features such as quilted leather seats, concert hall audio, intelligent air suspension systems and high-output engines.

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Midsize SUVs and sedans may outsell pickups in raw numbers, but U.S. automakers count on the latter as a high-margin, low-volume product that forms the core of their profits.

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Trade war or not, GM and other automakers are forging ahead on plans to increase production in Canada, which may be why U.S. negotiators are so focused on enforcing higher tariffs on Canadian-made pickups.

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“Trucks are the most profitable vehicles in a manufacturer’s portfolio, hands down,” Joe McCabe, president of consultant AutoForecast Solutions LLC, said. “They’re high margin and people are spending money on them like they’re going out of style.”

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Under the recently rejected trade deal, U.S. negotiators agreed to lower tariffs on Canadian-made vehicles to 15 per cent from 25 per cent, but not on medium- and heavy-duty pickups.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney cited that exception as a reason why trade talks broke down, saying it would have threatened GM’s Oshawa plant and also Ford Motor Corp., which is still finishing a $5 billion investment at its Oakville, Ont., plant, where it plans to start building its F-Series Super Duty pickups this fall.

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He said the proposed U.S. deal “would have made the production (of pickups) uneconomic over time.”

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Still, with an estimated $1 trillion in goods traded between the two countries, the situation is testing just how important pickup trucks are to Canada and its economy.

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Ford’s F-Series pickups have been the overall best-selling vehicle in Canada for 16 straight years and have held the same title even longer in the U.S.

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But measured by volume, auto production in Canada has largely shifted to Japanese-owned automakers, Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corp., neither of which manufacture pickups here.

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Less than 10 per cent of the 1.2 million vehicles produced in Canada in 2025 were pickups, but they represented about 25 per cent of the 10 million vehicles produced last year in the U.S.

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McCabe said U.S. negotiators’ focus on medium- and heavy-duty pickups may be more of an emotional argument in some ways.

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“It’s sort of like baseball and apple pie. The White House is saying, ‘We’re the pickup, we invented it, it’s our job,’” he said. “Our view is, ‘Yeah, but Canada uses pickup trucks, not just the U.S.’”