Protectionism by who? By definition protectionism cannot kill your own country's car industry.
The timeline goes like this:
1. Government gets pressured by industry to protect domestic industry from outside competition
2. Domestic industry stagnates as it has no reason to make competitive products
3. Time passes, quality/value gulf becomes so large that it becomes impossible to catch up to competition. It becomes impossible to export your goods and even domestic customers look elsewhere.
If the USA dropped tariffs and bans against Chinese car companies, American car companies would need to improve rapidly to survive. Instead, they’re selling us $50,000 decade old dinosaur designs like the Chrysler Pacifica.
This literally already happened to them with Japanese cars. And let me tell you, you don’t want to drive a Chevrolet from before Honda and Toyota sold cars in the United States.
Not protectionism related, but look at the MacBook Neo competitors shown off by Dell and HP at Computex. Competition drives innovation and cost reduction for consumers. Apple forced HP and Dell to make an affordable aluminum chassis computer for the masses and consumers are the winner in the situation.
Since the closure of Jeffboat in 2018 (among others), there's no non-military ship manufacturers in the US for anything even resembling cruise ship size (and even before that manufacturers like Jeffboat were mostly only making cargo barges) and the US military contractors have basically shrunk to a duopoly. Probably not the 100+ years later expectations of the Jones Act authors.
and it's not just the end product, it's the process. China has built almost entirely automated car factories. They're already 10+ years ahead of what's happening in the US/Europe.
The best thing that could happen to the US auto industry is if the US government allowed China into the US.
Correct, protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly.
Look at the car makers in Europe, they had decades to produce affordable electric cars, even lawmakers pushed their own population to buy electric cars with timelines and incentives, and they still failed miserably. How?
Tariffs are a last-ditch effort to buy more time. If you fail to use this time effectively, you will close shop. If you don't have tariffs, you close shop today.
Europe sells gasoline shitboxes for €30K when China could easily sell EVs for €20K, Europe (and the US) already lost.
This is under an assumption that the alternative would have been eradication of the industry, as in, “if we don’t protect the industry it will go out of business.” In reality, leading an industry to be more competitive is a lot better than protecting them from outside competition in the long term.
What was the economic value of protecting US steel for half a lifetime and then letting it turn into a dead industry? Wouldn’t it have been better for that protectionism to be more in the form of encouraging competition so that US steel companies were still thriving today? If the end result is going to be a dead industry why invest in protectionism at all?
It’s funny that you’re talking a bunch of smack about European electric cars without looking up sales numbers. The Volkswagen group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The top selling EV in Europe is a Skoda. VW and BMW are the top two EV companies globally besides Tesla and 4 Chinese brands.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/01/europe-ev-sales-report-...
https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-sold...