If Your Snowmobiles and PWCs Get A Whole Lot More Expensive, Blame Trump's New Tariffs

Are threats of US tariffs most akin to a game of whack-a-mole, or perhaps a mythical hydra? You know, where you either knock one down and another one pops up in its place, or you cut off one head and it grows three more? Which metaphor you run with is your choice; my point is that, just because the Supreme Court struck one tariffs avenue down, it didn't mean this administration didn't have backup plans to try next.

As of April 14, 2026, Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP), the parent company of Sea-Doo, Ski-Doo, and Can-Am, announced that it is officially suspending all financial guidance for 2027 due to the expected impact of new US tariffs. This marks the second year in a row that it's scrapped this guidance, though this time it's for a slightly different set of tariffs than it was last year. Under Section 232, as of April 6, 2026, all steel, aluminum, and copper imports into the US will lead to "a 25% tariff on the total value of imported snowmobiles and the majority of ORV models, replacing the previous 50% tariff on applicable metal content only." 

For anyone who's ever taken the plastics off any powersports vehicle and poked at the mechanical parts underneath, you can appreciate the difference between taxing an entire vehicle versus just the metal parts. Those figures add up quickly. 

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BRP's official announcement goes on to say that the company estimates its potential tariff cost with this action to exceed $500 million (unclear if that's US or Canadian dollars, but either way it's a lot) for the remainder of 2026. That's only taking this new tariffs measure into account, and not including any potential mitigation measures that may change the calculus in the coming weeks and months; they, as we, can only operate on the available information at any given time, and not on how we wish things were.

It's unclear how this will impact the company's sales over the coming year, particularly within the US. But at this point, it almost feels redundant to say that, because there's so much that's unclear about how anything will impact any company's sales going forward, since policy consistency doesn't seem to really exist right now. We'll continue to document the twists and turns as they arise, but the one thing that probably shouldn't surprise any of us at this point is that things can (and do) change very quickly.

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