President Joe Biden has been urged to ban imports of Chinese-made electric cars to the US.
The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, wrote “Chinese electric vehicles are an existential threat to the American auto industry”.
His comments are the strongest yet by any US lawmaker on the issue, while others have called for steep tariffs to keep Chinese electric vehicles (EV) out of the country.
In February, the White House said the US was opening an investigation into whether Chinese cars pose a national security risk. At the time, President Biden said that China’s policies “could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security” and that he would “not let that happen on my watch.”
He’s right. The idea of a sub $15k sedan is a threat to the US auto market. Make it an EV to boot and America just can’t compete in the free market.
It’s a shame that the common person has to get shafted to protect the auto industry and while I have zero sympathy to the c-level management and shareholders, the auto industry does employ many working class folks who could be very much harmed by cheap imported cars.
How many times do we need to bail this industry out? Detroit’s problems are entirely the fault of its own short-sighted greed. They’ve deliberately chosen not to produce affordable sedans, instead focusing only on super expensive giant luxury vehicles. This has even happened before. The exact same thing happened back in the 80s with the Japanese car companies. Toyota and Honda ate Detroit’s lunch because Detroit had become complacent and greedy.
The major problem here is that China is offering prices below production costs aiming to ruin foreign competition. Once the objective of a monopoly-like market is reached, they can increase the price.
China’s domestic market has already seen a heavy price war leaving many EV companies in financial troubles (and, consequently, leaving buyers often without the possibilty of software maintenance and other after-sales services).
Baidu’s brand WM Motor, for example, ran out of liquidity last year, as well as Tencent’s Aiways. Other brands like Levdeo or Singulato filed for bankruptcy if I remember that right.
[Edit typo.]
The major problem here is that the US is owned by the oil industry and they will never allow competitive EVs to be built here. The US could easily match what China’s doing, but those subsidies go to oil instead.
Not with the unions in the US they can’t. Part of the reason China is able to produce cheap cars is because they have cheap labor.
Including widespread use of slave labor. It doesn’t get any cheaper.
Are you referring to prison labor?
I’m referring to Chinese slave labor, which is not even remotely comparable to American prison labor.
The US has roughly 0.3% of it’s population as slave labor. China has 0.4%. That looks pretty comparable to me
Just to check your numbers:
5.8 million slaves in China in 2021 (0.41%).
800,000 prison laborers in America that same year (0.24%).
For as flawed as the American judicial and prison systems are, they are not even remotely as awful as China’s - and neither is the labor performed by American prison laborers compared to China’s slaves. They are not the same. Chinese slaves aren’t even given a trial - they are just randomly picked off the street and forced to work themselves to death.
To be fair, the EV market is already somewhat reliant on slave labor in Xinjiang, but Chinese companies especially-so for obvious reasons. Buying cars from Chinese companies means there’s basically no ability to pressure them out of using Xinjiang-sourced lithium.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the US actually bans import of products by companies in Xinjiang that can’t prove they don’t use forced labor in their supply chains, so this isn’t a hypothetical harm reduction, either.
If only we had some sort of social safety net…
This “trusting the free market” and squashing any competition points out how awful our system is.
Maybe the displaced workers can be hired by the government to fix our crumbling infrastructure.