They sell them in the EU, which has stricter safety regulations. If they set out to do it, they’ll flood the market and get the traditional manufacturers in trouble.
EU allows all sorts of stuff that isn’t allowed in the US. Believe it or not, US safety regs are generally higher than the EU (for passengers, anyway). The Ariel Atom, for example, needs some hoop jumping to make it US street legal, but can be driven without issue much of the EU.
Wow, I didn’t realize there were Chinese cars on the European market. Are the cars being received well? Are there major issues with them and if there are major issues, does price still make them worth it?
They’re surprisingly good, particularly BYD cars, in my experience.
Americans’ vehicles tend to be huge, wildly inefficient for their daily usage, and they throw off externalities like pedestrian and cyclist risks, road damage, and support for countries who use our gas spending to make the world less liberal.
VW, Honda, Toyota, and Datsun capitalized on American vehicle bloat to build massive, multinational companies with products in every segment. The Chinese are going to ruin our domestic manufacturers, once they decide to build bridgehead plants here.
Today, I’m driving an Acura that is made in Marysville, Ohio. Not assembled; it is substantively made here in the States. And, the chain reaction that led to Honda, a Japanese company, exporting profits made from American productivity in 2024, started with the Big Three making massively bloated, inefficient, expensive, poorly designed cars, leaving a gap in the market that foreign companies exploited with right-sized, efficient, affordable, reliable vehicles, starting in the ‘60s and exploding with the ‘73 oil crisis.
I don’t have time to find a link, but there have been studies that demonstrate that the exact choices being made by American manufacturers today—to not fully serve the bottom of the market—sow the seeds of their own future declines in the middle and upper markets.
