The auto-industry are full of them self longing for the high margin rich person market. BYD etc. seems like a good way to bring them back to earth.
If legacy US auto and Tesla choose to not make cheap EVs, allow China to sell into the market (with strong right to repair and consumer protections around anything where these products could be used in an adversarial way, telemetry, data security, cloud dependency optional, etc). If these builders start delivering cost parity vehicles, implement tariffs accordingly to defend the domestic market from dumping (very common).
Worst case, we send all the battery packs off for shucking to use in stationary storage, or recycling by Redwood Materials. That’s US refined battery feedstock ore now. Regardless, we’ve got lots of combustion miles to replace with EV miles. We must move faster.
If a product is artificially cheap then making it more expensive is removing an artificiality, not adding one.
TLDR What are you optimizing for, what are the incentives, and what is the intent of various actors. The math is the easy part, imho.
When the industry in question is crucial to retaining domestic industrial capacity to counter that foreign nation’s hostile geopolitical agenda, yes it is worse!
Protect markets for legitimate reasons, not out of domestic nepotism and laziness. BYD gets government support, US auto should get the same, but you actually have to show progress towards desired outcomes to justify cross border protectionism.
https://pca.st/episode/830546d3-e3d5-42c7-9fb9-9710fc1604ac?... (citation wrt China EV not dumping)
That begs the question. They're only "hiding behind" tariffs if the price of Chinese manufacturing were fair in the first place but it's not. In this environment the Chinese manufacturers are economic aggressors and the Federal government is shielding local manufacturers from unfree competition.