The former president’s violent “word salad” aside, Rep. Haley Stevens , said the “more aggressive we can be” on tariffs, the better.
“Ohio knows all too well how China illegally subsidizes its companies, putting our workers out of jobs and undermining entire industries from steel to solar manufacturing,” Brown said in a statement. “We can’t wait for China to run this same playbook in the auto industry — we need strong rules, including but not limited to tariffs, to stop a flood of Chinese electric vehicles that threaten Ohio auto jobs.
BYD, a Chinese EV manufacturing behemoth that most Americans have never heard of, overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest producer of electric vehicles. China has surpassed Japan as the world’s biggest auto exporter, selling both EVs and gasoline-powered cars around the globe. With the global auto industry transitioning to electric, China is poised to leapfrog the competition.
Cheap prices are an especially acute potential threat for a U.S. electric vehicle market that has largely focused on higher-end models — and where even the sticker prices of gasoline-powered cars and trucks have soared beyond many Americans’ comfort zones in recent years., as of July 2023 the average price of an electric vehicle in the U.S. hovered around $53,000.
For now, the existing 27.5-percent tariff on Chinese-made vehicles, including 25 percent imposed by the Trump administration, has largely kept them at bay. One notable exception is the Sweden-based luxury EV manufacturer Polestar, which is majority-owned by a Chinese company and sells cars in the U.S. that were made in China — though it has announced plans to