this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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Plenty of capitalist countries can have electric cars, including but not limited to Chinese cars. The problem isn't capitalism here, it is the US.
There are several different problems here and banning Chinese cars is possibly the worst solution. And with Trump and magats in charge, a better solution is off the table anyway.
Problem 1: American automakers don't make anything good and it's all expensive.
Problem 2: Americans need jobs, everyone buying their (second) most expensive belonging from abroad transfers manufacturing jobs abroad.
Problem 3: EV transition in the US isn't going as strong as it should be.
Problem 4: China has EV subsidies for cars sold to other countries. This allows for dumping stock at below cost prices, after already having super low production costs (among other things China is the world's battery manufacturer, Chinese EVs get batteries for much cheaper; also Chinese labor costs are at most a quarter of union labor in the US). Usually EV subsidies, if they exist, are on purchasing, not production.
The solution, to me, isn't banning Chinese EVs. It's a further increase of tariffs on cars made in China and then that tariff money should be used to fund an EV purchase subsidy so that all EVs get cheaper for the end user to buy (yes, said subsidies would also apply to Chinese EVs). Now if BYD or whoever wants to sell a ton of cars in the US, they have to manufacture in the US, which means they have similar costs to other manufacturers (minus the batteries of course, nothing to do about that without causing a ton of issues. You can't just increase tariffs on Chinese batteries because non-Chinese manufacturers need them too).
My proposed solution would directly affect #2 and #4 in a positive manner, be better for #3 than outright banning Chinese EVs, but not as good as simply allowing them to dump nearly-free cars on Americans (which would of course increase in price once the competition is dead) and forces the American automakers themselves to sort out #1 because right now much of their competition is the German big 3 and Toyota, all of which are expensive too (shit, I consider Toyota more expensive than the Germans because I look at used cars, I love depreciation)
But what do I know, I'm not American and don't know shit about economics and trade wars and don't even own an EV.
It is pretty much what the EU is doing. Tariffs on Chinese cars to compensate for their subsidies and brand agnostic subsidies for EVs on the domestic market (also applicable to Chinese cars of course, but equally to everyone else, levelling the playing field).
We have yet to see if the European producers are going to survive but they at least appear to have gotten the memo on at least competing in the sector of not oversized, affordable EVs again. Renault is pretty successful with its R5 and I would think also the new Renault Twingo should sell well for example.
In the US the car industry has pushed itself into a corner it cannot get out anymore, except maybe Tesla, which does know how to build efficient and somewhat affordable cars. It just chooses to go the opposite way because the guy at the top is a lunatic. The rest of the sector doesn't even know how to do it, even if they wanted. They are heading to their Kodak/Nokia end game. Except Nokia found a way out by offloading the damage to a foreign company stupid enough to purchase the doomed branch and consequently refocusing on the other branches that it could secure a future (for Nokia that was mobile communication infrastructure).
Lobbying for walling off the US market while making laws to postpone the death of oversized combustion engine vehicles, will postpone the inevitable but only by so much. At some point the US will be the only underdeveloped country left, still choking in traffic fumes, I don't think it would even get that far before everything collapses among US car producers.