The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
https://homeland.house.gov/2025/05/21/homeland-republicans-p...
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
Today it’s “everyone can do this but we can’t”
And always used diplomacy and superpower status to push other countries into buying more american.
Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story.
In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.
So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.
This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients4—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.
But then USA went down the road toward enshittification...
I don't think we get to be stagnant and fend off Chinese industrial hegemony. It's not a symmetric bet.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
Whatever the stated reasons are is one thing.
The biggest issue is that a network of BYDs in the US would be a massive intelligence coup.
It will never be permitted unless the intelligence aspect is addressed… if it can be.
The patterns of aggressively tariffing foreign automakers for protectionism in the US long pre-dates any sort electronics in cars.
Lobbying forces in the US care deeply about the latter, not so much the former.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
To a first order approximation yes.
The online discussion is dominated by fanboys who don't actually know squat and people who have an expensive purchase they need to feel justified in.
The differences between two competing cars of different makes is way, way, way less than these people will make it out to be.
These products are intentionally designed to be neck and neck. They're different, don't get me wrong. But they're all very close. Like a kid guessing the right answer on a math test. Things aren't the same, but the dumb fanboys who think that every Camry goes 500k on oil changes, every Tesla gets stuck in the shop forever, every American car handles like poo, etc, etc. Those idiots are wronger. You'd never be able to tell how different the cars are on those sorts of axis without fairly rigerous methods. And those people dominate the discussion.
You’d never know because you never had a choice in the first place