Stop them now, before it’s too late. That’s the message an influential Ohio senator sent to President Joe Biden in an open letter urging him to ban the importation of Chinese-built EVs to save the American auto industry from being wiped out.
“Chinese electric vehicles are an existential threat to the American auto industry,” wrote the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown. “We cannot allow China to bring its government-backed cheating to the American auto industry. The U.S. must ban Chinese electric vehicles now, and stop a flood of Chinese government-subsidized cars that threaten Ohio auto jobs, and our national and economic security.”
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Brown claims that state subsidies the Chinese automakers receive would make it impossible for their U.S. counterparts to compete on price, and the pressure would ruin unionized American workers’ chances of negotiating pay and benefits improvements in future. And the employment worries don’t stop there because Brown also quotes figures from lobby group Alliance for American Manufacturing that suggests every single automotive job supports 11 others.
The U.S. already has a tariff system in place that makes it expensive to import a car from China, but the Republican Senator from Ohio thinks stronger action is needed.
“When the goal is to dominate a sector, tariffs are insufficient to stop their attack on American manufacturing,” Brown said. “Instead, the Administration should act now to ban Chinese EVs before they destroy the potential for the U.S. EV market.”
Beyond highlighting the economic threat Chinese EVs present to American industry, and pointing out that Europe is on the verge of being flooded with cars from China, to show what could happen in the U.S., Brown also mentions the cybersecurity risk China-built cars might pose.
But what he fails to mention is that many Western brands, including U.S.-based Tesla, also build cars in China. Although Tesla doesn’t currently import Chinese-made vehicles to America, it does bring large quantities of them to Europe. A recent Jato study looking into the rise in the number of Chinese-built cars landing in Europe found that while one in five EVs sold on the continent comes from China, 44 percent of that fifth were sold by Western brands like Tesla and Volvo.
Do you think President Biden should ban the sale of Chinese-built cars in the U.S., or is Brown overreacting? And if Biden does enact a ban, should Western brands like Tesla get a free pass? Leave a comment and let us know.
