The EU will impose additional tariffs of 17.4% to 38.1% on electric cars produced in China, the European Commission announced on Wednesday (12 June), as preliminary results from its anti-subsidy investigation confirmed prices are being distorted by Chinese state support.
The value chain of Chinese electric cars “benefits from unfair subsidisation, which is causing a threat of economic injury to EU battery electric vehicles producers,” EU Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas said on Wednesday (12 June).
“When our partners breach the rules, we will assert our rights,” Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said in a statement.
“Today we have reached a milestone in our anti-subsidy investigation,” he said, adding that “this is based on clear evidence of our extensive investigation and in full respect of WTO rules.”
Duties will differ per carmaker, with Chinese state-owned manufacturer SAIC facing the highest duty at 38.1%, Chinese Geely to face 20% and BYD 17.4%.
so:
- car dealers don’t want to sell EVs, you need to push them otherwise they’ll try to sell an ICE model
- car makers have collectively decided that EV = luxury vehicle that must be sold at least for 45k
- car makers don’t really want to make EVs - when the government they introduce a tax subsidy, they increase the price by that exact amount (VW Up for example, they decided that it could be never to sold 5k over the ICE model - when the government increased the subsidy, VW increased the price, and when the subsidy rose to 13k they discontinued the model as it would cannibalize sales of other models)
- charge point operators just want to get the european funds to install chargers, but then they’re going to neglect any kind of maintenance, to the point that for enelx fast chargers it’s the norm to find them broken or out of service and the exception when they work as intended.
- charge point operators also don’t really want to sell electricity, so they set a 2000% markup. Paying electricity for 1 euro per kwh it’s like paying gas at 3 euro per liter
- charge point operators have collectively decided that in order to pay for the charge, customers must use the most user-unfriendly process as possible. Can’t just accept credit card at the POS with lower fees, no, must register on the proprietary app, search for the charger on the map that almost always requires google play services, find it, guess which of the 8 pins on the map is the right one, hope that unlocks, and so on.
it’s almost a miracle that you can see people driving an EV in italy
The point with EVs being over 45k is mostly the extremely pricey battery, China just subsidized until their cars are at a better price, the EU wants to protect European car manufacturers, that’s that.
Battery prices are now close to $100 per kWh and are predicted to keep dropping.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/electric-vehicle-battery-prices-falling.html
That’s $7k for the 60-70kWh battery we see in lots of cars. That’s offset against an engine that has multiple hundreds of moving parts, also worth several thousand.
The engine has hundreds of parts but really only a couple of them are moving. That’s the beauty of electric motors.
An engine is not thousands of dollars. They mass produce them and so the incremental cost for each one is less than $100 each. There is a lot of engineering costs in an engine, and the cost to setup mass production is high, but that is amortized over all the cars they put that engine in. (there is a reason auto maters only have a few engines that they put in everything)
A battery is $7000, but the raw materials and labor to make it are a large part of that price (I don’t have insight on what the price is) Of course auto makers know they need a lot of batteries and so are working on automation to bring the per battery cost down.
“Subsidized until their cars are at a better price”
What do you think subsidies are? Do you think China is paying $10k for each export sale? Do you think China is just hemorrhaging money so that they can bump sales numbers up?
China dumped billions of dollars into a domestic fast charging network that aggressively stimulated domestic demand and dumped billions of dollars into clean energy initiatives to make sure that electricity prices hover around 1RMB/kWh ($0.14/kWh). How much is electricity in Europe? How much is it in the US?
China offered $1750 in purchase-side tax incentives that have since been phased out. How much are the American purchase-side tax incentives passed by the IRA? Are they still ongoing?
Shanghai gave Tesla hundreds of millions in low-interest loans to set up a factory in Shanghai as opposed to, say, Jiangsu, in exchange for billions of dollars in investment. How much did Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory receive in subsidies?
Plus, let’s take a look at who’s actually exporting cars to Europe:
MG (SAIC), Volvo (Geely), Tesla, and European joint ventures (BMW, Renault, Volkswagen, etc.)
China has been subsidizing the infrastructure for EVs, absolutely, but subsidizing infrastructure is not illegal. If Europe wants to protect its domestic car manufacturers, the first thing it should look at is Tesla. There’s also a reason BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes oppose tariffs: these risk retaliation against their currently rather unfettered access to the highly profitable, rapidly growing premium car market in China. They’re seeing upwards of 10% YoY growth in their luxury car lineups.
The EU Commission is stabbing itself in the chest to save its face. von der Leyen is pursuing a personal vendetta against the best interests of German automakers, completely forgetting the fact that while 10% of Chinese car production is exported, about 70% of German car production is exported. Meanwhile, while Chinese cars predominantly target the lower end of the market, German cars for export are overwhelmingly premium and luxury vehicles. Just an insane policy that seems to be more political pandering than anything else.
Oh thank goodness, the fossil fuel industry is preserved just a little while longer!
I think that there was just no good choice in this matter. I mean, look at how great it turned out for Europe to bond together with Russia over cheap gas. I know that cheap gas and electric cars are not the same thing, by far, but still, if we got dumped by electric cars in China, we’d be wide open for economic attacks like it happened just a few years ago.
That said, I’d love if we compensated for this by finally shifting subsidies from flights to rail, or by shifting from 100LL to 100UL in general aviation, or cracking down on ships using bunker fuel.
Or put the screws on BMW and VW to pull their heads out their asses and start being competitive.
If this tariff went along with a law saying that all European cars had to be electric by a certain date, I’d feel like this was anything but just preserving Europe’s fossil fuel interests.
I mean there kind of is. As is stands, selling cars that emit CO2 will no longer be allowed after 2035. You could argue that that’s far too late, and I would agree, but there is a date and since car manufacturers usually plan ahead (I hope), there probably won’t be many fossil fuel-powered cars by then. It is, however, not strictly limited to electric cars. It just is not allowed to emit CO2.
Selling EVs below the profitable rate to corner a market and destroy competition. You know, the economic term “dumping”.
Electric cars will not solve climate change, public transport even if it wasn’t fully electric could…but nobody seems to give a shit about that :/
Just for the record: Some cars from BMW, Dacia, Renault and Tesla are also imported from China and will get a 21% tariff as well. Probably lots of other brands as well.
It will be interesting to see if they will attempt to pull production back home.
VW seems to have an advantage by already going into fully domestic production, but they still need to prove that they can match the pricing.
I think they would need far steeper tariffs to get manufacturing to move out of China
I’ll tell this story in three parts:
-
Tesla’s US subsidies
-
China’s EV exports
-
China’s “overcapacity”
Part 1.Tesla’s US subsidies. Under the US’ Inflation Reduction Act, purchases of new EVs made in the USA were given a tax incentive of $7500. Previously, states such as California has other incentives such as the $7500 incentive under CVRP. How much in subsidies has Tesla received from tax credits alone under the IRA in 2023, ignoring state-level benefits and carryover from pre-2023 benefits? 654000 sales, for a total of almost $5 billion dollars in purchase-side government subsidies. For 2023. We also know that Tesla has received billions in state-level government funding to set up factories in California, and billions more in government funding for their other various efforts. In comparison between 2009 and 2022, China handed out about $28 billion in EV subsidies, much of that at the state-level to encourage companies to set up factories. In fact, Tesla received huge subsidies to set up it’s factories in Shanghai. By the end of 2022, China had phased out most purchase-side subsidies (except some lingering programs that are not set for renewal). Note that the maximum purchase-side subsidy was about $1750. China’s most significant subsidy today is in it’s expansion of the domestic charging network: China makes up 68% of the world’s charging stations, with a huge number of them being fast chargers. Much of that expansion came out of government coffers and is a huge driver for EV adoption in China.
Part 2. China’s EV exports. In 2022, China’s EV exports were as follows, sorted by volume:
270k - Tesla
140k - SAIC (mostly under the British brand MG)
72k - European joint ventures
55k - BYD
(others)
So, let’s be more clear about what the EU means: they don’t like that foreign companies (including European ones, but mostly Tesla, and almost all European/American brands) are setting up shop in China to produce cars for export.
Part 3. China’s “overcapacity”. It’s no secret that China has pitiful O&G reserves. Oil, notably, is needed for ICE vehicles, but not for EVs. That is, the switch to EVs is a matter of national security for China as it reduces Chinese reliance on foreign oil supplies. Indeed, a huge proportion of Chinese EV production is going to the domestic market, and exports make up only about 10% of total sales (for reference, this number is more like 70% for Toyota).
To sum it up: unlike Toyota/Japan (and others), China is consuming the vast majority of its production. Meanwhile, a huge number of it’s exports are from foreign companies. It’s most notable exporter is Tesla, which is notable for having received $5 billion in purchase-side tax incentives in 2023 in the US… Alone. This is compared to $28 billion between 2009 and 2022, most of which have been phased out, and for which a big proportion was to encourage setting up factories in specific provinces or to build out a domestic charging network.
Edit: to clarify, China does have more car factories than they know what to do with. This is because ICE companies are getting fucked by EV companies. All those factories dedicated to producing ICE cars? Fucked. Idling. Useless. Sales of all cars in China: Volkswagen (-0.2% YoY), Toyota (-3.8% YoY), Honda (-12.3% YoY), Nissan (-14.3% YoY). The only foreign brands that are staying alive in China are EV brands like Tesla (+20% YoY) and luxury cars like BMW (+7.8% YoY) and Audi (+11.3% YoY). These idling ICE factories are currently being closed by the government and the government is limiting licenses handed out for new factories.
Ironically, Tesla is a large part of the reason why Chinese EVs are so cheap because they started the price war… They just couldn’t win it.
America could have held on to the EV market if they kept Tesla in America but instead Elon took it for a gander and outsourced all production to China.
Hey it could be worse
It could be a 100% tax like the USA
Could also be roads full of boat sized junk from Ford, GM, and Chrysler.
