In a country with 42 million inhabitants this doesn't seem like a big change even for canada, let alone for the global economy.
For the average family, being able to spend significantly less on a car is a big deal.
But all the policy support that would have let North American automakers build up a competitive position with China is gone, so this is more about just acknowledging reality now.
It’s tough to convince most price-inelastic people they shouldn’t buy a car that is 1/2 price, even if it has fewer features.
Edit: to be clear I meant that the US did not compete, not that they could not compete
This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success.
China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice.
(I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment)
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected.
This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice.
[1] Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw - December 4th, 2025
[2] Chinese EV makers accelerate robotics drive for ‘game-changing’ edge over US - https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chin... | https://archive.today/sJKKv - November 19th, 2025
[3] The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf - May 31st, 2025
[4] Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025
[5] HN Search: labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(TLDR Increase productivity with automation to compete with others who already have, buy robots, not share buybacks)
On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future).
Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more.
A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example.
Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
Chinese manufacturers have an average labour cost per vehicle of $585. American manufacturers have an average cost of $1341.
You can't buy an equivalent American EV for an extra $756.
Source: https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-ve...
Also, Chinese auto factories are heavily automated now, even when compared to American auto factories.
But link #2 seems solid, and a related search on Google Scholar points at a lot of interesting papers.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:B47EWn6YcDUJ:sc...
I looked at a few, and the overall consensus seems to be that at least EVs are not worse than ICEVs (and I suppose EVs will get efficient faster than ICEVs(.
Thanks!
Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants.
Am I off base here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision...
Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments)
(Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)
The new bottom has been moving to Vietnam, etc.
The thing about China is that they’re more strategic with their money and have longer timelines and clear, achievable visions. If you read the Wikipedia page for Made in China 2025 you’ll get the wrong impression that their success is due to more recent pushes; the vision is far more universal and has existed for far longer. You don’t get to the forefront of advanced manufacturing from nothing in ten years. Look at the 5th and 6th Five-Year Plans, into the seventh… you see the groundwork laid for present day China. The US rarely does that sort of long term thinking or planning these days, and it’s not even about the political winds changing or short-termism as much as that we lack one unified vision. Without that unified vision you can’t plan long term and you also can’t correct glaring problems. For example, if we had a unified vision on manufacturing, an obvious issue would be the lack of an American JLCPCB. You could create one with a stick and carrot approach, tariff assembled PCBs, new rule that any imported assembled PCB has to prominently display “electronics made in China”, smart subsidies for US board houses that encourage scaling and cost reduction. But that level of cohesion and vision rarely happens in the US and so we get a chaotic hodgepodge.
China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while.
China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there.
Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.
As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
This is false. The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population. I want a cheap EV. I will buy a cheap EV from a US automaker. They do not want to sell cheap EVs. The US won't allow me to buy excellent, cheap Chinese EVs. The US population is being held economically hostage for legacy automaker profits and the fossil fuel industry. Why should the US consumer collectively have to pay more for these low quality decisions? I am incentivized to root for the destruction of US legacy auto so that I can eventually get a high quality, inexpensive Chinese EV, because that will be all who is left building them. China sells more EVs than the US sells entirely. It is only a matter of time as they continue to spin up manufacturing.
Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself (if unwilling to build EVs, which appears to be the case). Climate change does not care about nation state boundaries. Certainly, if you don't believe in climate change, or don't believe it to be pressing, there is no discussion to be had.
New data: EVs grew more in ’25 than ’24, despite constant lies saying otherwise - https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev... - January 14th, 2026
The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... | https://archive.today/p2hl1 - January 30th, 2024
It's not false. See Honda, Toyota, &c. many models are made in the US by Americans even if they're Japanese companies.
> The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population.
The US industry regardless of reason isn't going to be able to make a cheap, high-quality EV because it doesn't have access to affordable refining capabilities due to various reasons. So the actual situation is, sure the US could let China ship in a bunch of awesome EVs, but then the US automakers will suffer and some will go out of business and then the US just won't be making cars and those union autoworker jobs will be gone. Some people are fine with that I guess, but strategically it doesn't make a lot of sense for the US to allow the domestic auto industry to be crushed. Same thing with Germany. The EU is already starting to roll back EV mandates [1] for the same reason the US is focusing back on oil and natural gas.
> Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself
On the other hand, as an American voter and even an EV driver, I disagree with these actions. EVs at all cost isn't a goal that makes sense or that I'm interested in. A better argument is to just do away with cars entirely. EVs still create c02, require toxic processing of materials and components, and while they're better for the environment, they're not as good as walking or transit.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-rel...
Well, you're arguing this in the wrong country. You might check your priors. I regret to inform you that only about 5% of Americans use public transit [1] [2] [3], and that is unlikely to change unless there is a sea change of migration towards urban areas from the suburbs and rural areas.
A majority of US miles are driven in rural areas or areas without mass transit [4], and the sun belt, where there is limited to no public transit, holds roughly half of the US population. I certainly agree to destroy demand for light vehicle passenger miles in urban areas with robust public transit and other non vehicle options, but the rest of the US will require EVs of some sort. Most of the US does not have mass transit infrastructure, and won't for the remainder of most of our lives (as of this comment).
[1] https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/public-tran...
[2] https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...
[3] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-t...
[4] https://www.bts.gov/geography/geospatial-2/daily-vehicle-mil...
Yes… I’m aware. I’m arguing for change in that figure. Part of the reason American cars are so expensive is because as an industry manufacturers can raise prices because there are no alternatives to car ownership.
The US won’t require EVs for any purpose anytime in our lives. We don’t have the processing and manufacturing capacity to build them here, and we won’t allow our auto industry to go defunct either. It’ll be gasoline for the foreseeable future. Not necessarily a future I like as an EV owner but that’s how things look today. Winning a war is more important than the climate, unfortunately.
If by that you mean they propped up their industry and undercut everyone else until they went out of business, then increased prices to a point just below where it would be profitable for someone else to try again?
Then use their monopoly position to further their interests in other sectors?
Edit: Which I may note is probably the same strategy being applied here as well.
Mexico recently applied 50% tariffs on Chinese imports. Of course other countries without a trade deal also were slapped with tariffs, but they were broadly targeted at China because Mexico’s president is handling Trump much better than, say, Carney.
If all you have in town is a target, that’s where people will shop. If you open up a goodwill there might be some handwringing and “I would never” rhetoric. But many people will go to the goodwill even if they don’t admit it.
*To roughly quantify, I'd say mid-to-late 80s Ford/GM car, not 70s Ford/GM car. It never stranded me, but it did break a few times in inconvenient fashion.
- A move to automate auto factory lines in Chinese auto factories. Up until about a decade ago the emphasis was still on using human labor, and quality took a hit accordingly. Robots are much more precise and consistent, the quality difference between a Chinese-made cars and the same kind of car made in Japan was huge.
- EVs. EV motors are just more reliable in general, and are easier to replace when they wear out or are defective. You don't have so many moving parts any more, and the Chinese became world leaders in battery tech.
If I ever live in China again and need to buy a car, it will definitely be an EV. Heck, I would never buy a BMW ICE (maintenance sucks) but I bought a BMW EV...
As someone who's worked in the auto industry (in Canada) I have to 'hard disagree.' The big three have proven time and time again that we (Canadians) are second-class citizens when it comes to how they operate the facilities built here. Even before any of this nonsensical tariff nonsense, billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort to satisfy people in the short-term and thanking us by continuing their movement of production out of the country. Instead of trying to talk the president down from his pointlessly harmful tariffs, or doing what Toyota/Honda have done in pivoting to building worldwide models beside the domestic ones, the big three are gleefully taking the opportunity to expedite the closure or downsizing of facilities here.
Outside of the chuds who 'need' a pickup truck to satisfy their fragile ego, sales of "American" vehicles are starting to drop, with buyers choosing domestically-produced where possible (like the Toyota Rav4, Lexus NX/RX, or Honda Civic/CR-V).[0]
[0]: https://ca.investing.com/news/economy-news/market-share-of-u...
You could replace "Canada" with the "United States" and it's equally true. They aren't treating you any different than us.
Now we have U.S. automakers who are derefential to the current regime's leader and are pulling out. The Federal and Ontario government both tried to somehow make them happy, but you can't make that kind of monster happy. So it's time to move on.
Trump's message is loud and clear. The Canadian Prime Minister has said, "the past relationship with the US is over."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y41z4351qo
The US President: "US does not need cars made in Canada; free trade deal is irrelevant"
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/we-dont-need-cars-made-in-canada-trump-says-calls-cusma-irrelevant/
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/sentinel-review-woodstock/20260116/281629606665800That is exactly what they did.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...
> The tariffs follow a May announcement by U.S. President Joe Biden of 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese-made EVs.
> Trudeau said on Sunday night that he had discussed China and other national geopolitical issues with U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan.
> smells like rolling out a Canadian auto market that is not dependent on the US
The last federal election was almost entirely decided by which leader made the best pitch to Canadians on who would be better equipped to handle Donald Trump and to make the economy less dependent on the USA as a whole.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/08/can...
If the context changes, it is reasonable to change which issue you focus on.
If I was in Canadas position, I’d prefer trading with the guy with shitty practices over the guy actively threatening my sovereignty.
I don’t get the indignation you’re expressing. Do you work with people in your personal life after they threaten your existence?
Not that I'm condoning this at all, I think China is a very concerning actor on the world stage. But I can certainly understand the mindset of many Canadians to reflexively seek out alternatives to more USA interdependence, short sighted as some of that may be.
China has been engaging in "unfair, non-market policies and practices and intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity and lack of rigorous labour and environmental standards" for decades, but Canada only changed their minds when Biden told them to.
"You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar" -- Justin Trudeau
Yeah, I'm sure he did it because he gives a fsck about human rights and fair markets.
Feels like being dependent on both the Chinese _and_ the Americans to me, which doesn't exactly feel like a win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_case_of_Meng_Wanzh...
Between threatening, and some actual military intervention, with Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, and itself the US is spread pretty thin at the moment. I think Canada will slowly open up to China and boil the frog if you will.
If they are smart about it then it will probably work out really well for them. They will need a new market for their oil, timber, ..etc since the US is no longer a reliable partner. This will take years but as long as China doesn’t do something dumb like invade Taiwan they can just sit back and win while the US is busy self destructing.
I say this as an American, also a veteran, who loves his country but hates what is currently going on.
There's probably enough political willpower in these provinces and money (paid by the US) to turn this into a real movement.
And from there, Yukon and the Northwest Territories are easy next dominoes.
I'm only trying to give a feel for them numbers, I did check the average selling price for a new BYD
Not such as huge shift in total, but EV’s are still a small percentage of total vehicle sales in Canada.
So because the number of new cars purchased each year is increasing the average age is significantly below 1/2 the average car’s lifespan.
https://www.brokerlink.ca/blog/how-long-do-cars-last-in-cana...
> In 2020, the Automotive Industries Association of Canada (AIA Canada) reported the average age of Canadian vehicles was 9.7 years, though many industry experts believe that number is closer to 10.5 years today.
Cars in the north have major rust problems, even if you're exceptionally careful, from exposure to snow and road salt.
(if you look at a random sampling of 100 cars, 5 will be from this year, 5 from 2025, and so on until you've counted the 5 cars from 2005 ; the average age will be 10.5 years)
If you assume that there are more cars sold every year (due to demographics: way more humans are alive today than in 2005), then this is consistent with a useful lifespan of 25 years or more per car since the "10.5" average is skewed younger because of the age pyramid bias.
“The average car lifespan now is closer to 322,000 kilometres, which works out to around 10 to 12 years for most drivers.”
“While the average vehicle in Canada may be designed to last around a decade, there are several factors, some of which are within your control and some of which are not, that can impact how long your car lasts.”
My last two cars were scrapped at 13 years due to rust effects.
322,000 km / 15,200 = 21.2 years. Assuming nobody has multiple cars.
From that link: Here's a breakdown of the average annual kilometres driven in some provinces:
Ontario: 16,000 km Alberta: 15,200 km British Columbia: 13,100 km
My last two cars succumbed to rust at a little over 20 years of age yet were still reliable, started easily and ran well.
AB uses grit and brine, I see lots of older cars driving around here (in good shape excluding windshields).
So the numbers are calculated including traffic collisions in the life span calculation.
I wonder what the actual number is if you exclude traffic collisions? "How often should I expect to have to replace my car" and "How long should I expect a car to last" aren't quite the same question.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canadian-ev-sales-fell-off-a-cl...
The premier ("governor") of Ontario, where GM, Ford, Toyota, etc, have manufacturing plants feels otherwise:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-canadian-el...
How many chinese EVs are in canada right now? If the answer is close enough to zero as to be insignificant, how is this saving canadians any money on chinese EVs?
If it helps, we can say something like: this adds $1-$2B gross revenue to china selling EVs to canada. Profit, probably less than a $1B. Needle still not moving.
It's a geopolitical needle move, not a purely financial one.