The Beijing Auto Show is currently taking place in China, offering those of us behind Trump’s tariff curtain a glimpse into what is increasingly considered the most advanced automobile market in the world. We’re told that Chinese electric vehicles leave everyone behind, with infotainment that makes your smartphone look like a StarTac, range numbers that would make a turbodiesel Audi cry, and charging that could be even faster than filling up with gasoline, depending on the size of your tank.
As an American, I mostly have to trust someone else’s word. If there’s one thing Democratic politicians can agree with Republicans on, even now, it’s that they don’t want cars from Chinese manufacturers on American roads. Toward the end of his administration, President Joe Biden imposed a 100 percent tariff in Chinese electric vehicles. Under the Biden and then Trump administrations, Congress passed a law restricting the sale of connected car software linked to China in the US President Trump has added more tariffs on Chinese importswhich makes their cars even less competitive here. And only this weekMore than 70 Democratic representatives called for maintaining barriers to Chinese cars for economic and national security reasons.
This leaves those elected officials increasingly out of step with popular sentiment on the Internet (I’m using Ars comments and the Bluesky social media platform as my referents). From what I can see, there is a huge appetite for those attractive and cheap Chinese electric vehicles. Headlines like The Reuters claim that “for the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 new Chinese EVs” only reinforces that sentiment.
