100% tariff and political threats -- implying that they'd find a way to mark them as "unsafe", despite the fact that Canada and Europe tend to have higher safety standards than the US and already have BYD presence.

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).

Global automakers typically make small modifications to vehicles for different markets. Cars, like most engineered products, are built to a list of design criteria. BYD, like every large automaker that does this, has capable engineers that can target any regulatory specification you give them. They already do it for all of the other markets they sell in, just as every global automaker does.

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.

I could see them going the Huawei (pun intended and apologised for)

I cannot answer your question but I visited China last year and the amount of different EVs they had was staggering. And really nice vehicles, I was very impressed with that.

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> Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?

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.

This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?

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

> What are we missing out on?

You’d never know because you never had a choice in the first place

in a word, choice. also it's a much quieter car inside, despite being cheaper.

Freedom.

and what's the tesla equivalent for the BYD dolphin?

Competition. Lower prices. Better repairability.

Your first point is ironic considering Western tech companies are being taken to court for training AI off of pirated intellectual property. I’m not trying to be pro-China but I think this idea that “stealing” technology is exclusive to China is naive. There’s a whole classic Silicon Valley story about the development of the GUI at Apple and Microsoft on the subject. Steve Jobs was furious with Bill Gates when Windows debuted especially since Microsoft was a premier Macintosh developer.

It’s also a little bit ignorant of the existence of different cultural views of copying. Americans who love the second amendment wouldn’t want Europeans telling them to follow European gun laws, why should China follow Western IP laws?

The culture of copying and iterating in the Chinese hardware industry has proven to be incredibly good for innovation and healthy competition, just like open source has been incredibly good for the US software industry.

One example of Western IP ideology being stifling: 3D printing was artificially held back from consumers by patents on FDM printing. The moment those patents expired, prices dropped by two orders of magnitude. It’s easy to argue that Western IP laws result in oligopolies and monopolies forming as an inevitability.

Even if you don’t agree with that, the fact remains that many technology transfers to China are done willingly for payment (e.g., IBM PC division sold to Lenovo, Motorola Mobility sold to Lenovo, high speed rail technology was sold to China. Nobody twisted Volkswagen’s arm and demanded that they build factories in China and train local workforces on automotive production, that was done for the same profit-seeking reasons Toyota came to America and taught GM the Toyota Production System).

Leveraging their coal power for today and building wind/solar/battery for tomorrow is a smart strategy that pragmatically considers their current resource mix. Trump administration canceling already approved wind projects because he doesn’t like how his Scottish golf course has a view of them is not smart strategy.

China is not a big oil producer relative to their size and population. In that sense countries like the US, Canada, and Russia are far more energy secure.

I would certainly expect a country with 4x the population of the US, which is used as the center of global manufacturing, to need a lot of power.

I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.