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apart from the difference of “cheap” and “cheap + tariff” prices, I think US also applies a car dealer policy.
automakers have to sell through car retailers and what not. adding the middle man’s markup may or may not turn the price cheap anymore.
The tariffs is an interesting conversation. I guess they’re being used to keep international competition at bay. Seems to be working.
It couldn’t possibly be that our safety regulations and requirements are way more strict. Nope, can’t be that at all. Plenty of vehicles are already manufactured elsewhere and shipped here. This isn’t about tarrifs or even the dealership setup.
Maybe you and others don’t know that BMW is not American? Same with Toyota and others. This isn’t about international competition.
Sometimes that cheap price ends up coming with a high cost. The US is an auto manufacturing country. Simply letting cheap Chinese cars come here would cost hundreds of thousands of well paying, stable jobs. The same people who feign concern that their iPhone are made with near slave labor in China, will completely forget about those slave labor conditions for their cheap Chinese EV if it saves them a few grand. We have enough stuff made in China. The world is at a level where it is frighteningly dependent on that one country for a whole ton of goods. We don’t need to add cars to that list as well.
But it’s more than just that. We have safety and emissions regulations. The emission thing isn’t a concern for EVs, but that’s kept lesser foreign brands out for decades. The safety thing is incredibly important though. As recently as just a year or two, Chinese cars were folding up like an accordion in similarly stringent European crash tests. We have enough carnage on American roads as it is, we don’t need these poorly engineered Chinese EVs to add to that.
The US government offers EVs a rebate, but that only applies to cars built here. That rebate can really help in lowering the price of EVs down to similar-ish levels as what it would take to ship a Chinese EV over here and sell it. Sort of. Also to sell a vehicle here, you really need a dealership network of some kind. Tesla has shown that it doesn’t need to be a traditional dealer network. It can be more like storefronts, but at some point there has to be some place where consumers can see your product and that costs money and adds to the total cost of a vehicle directly or indirectly. Things do need to get repaired at some point as well, so consumers aren’t going to just buy a car if there isn’t some kind of repair and maintenance facility nearby. Chinese brands lack any of this infrastructure
So China can keep their cars, we don’t need them here.
My car is already capable of spying on me; I don’t need to literally know the CCP would be spying on me.
