Cars and solar panels get hit the hardest with tariffs and restrictions.
Solar panels: [1]
Cars: [2]
More devices are being hit by US digital sovereignty rules. Most US talk about this revolves around the EU not allowing processing of data about EU citizens outside the EU.
It's now a big issue for US customers, too.
The US is applying it to many classes of devices. For cars, there's the “Connected Vehicles Rule”.[3] Cars can't phone home to China or some other countries. New models of DJI drones are not allowed to be imported into the US, as mentioned in the article.[4]
WiFi-equipped routers have even tighter restrictions.[5]
Will this be extended to phones? "Smart" TVs? That's going to be interesting.
I don't understand the surprise in this article. This particular story is absolutely nothing new—the Germans and Japanese did it first to the US car market, which is inefficient, stuck in a bygone era, and propped up by government protectionism. Nearly all* American cars have been backwards in all metrics since about the 1970s.
In general, if you wanted...
Reliability: Japanese.
Value: Korean, French, Japanese.
Performance: German, Italian, maybe every now and then British.
Luxury: German, Italian, British, and depending on marque, Japanese.
And today, Chinese marques are eating everyone's lunch on every metric in the EV sector because they have seen how everyone else builds cars, lorries, and buses for a while, learnt how to do it themselves, got rid of the ICE, popped a battery in them, and have been massively undercutting the market for a while now.
* I should qualify this properly to pre-emptively stave off the ooh-rah crowd: every now and then there has been a decent A-to-B car out of the US, like the Fiesta. Additionally there are models sold purely in Europe like the Ford Mondeo.
The EV-only companies build much better EVs than companies that also build ICE cars. It took Tesla to get EVs going in the US.
It will be interesting to see if Slate's little electric pickup truck really ships at the promised price point. They're advertising and taking pre-orders.
Delivery dates are vague. "Q4 2026" probably means "a few demo units". Maybe in 2027.
Incidentally, the Donut Labs solid-state battery appears to have been a scam.[1]
They were supposed to ship electric motorcycles with it in Q1 2026, and we're almost into Q3.
"$25 million raised from 1,300+ small investors", says Electrek. Their "solid state" battery seems to be an ordinary pouch type lithium-ion battery, no better than a good lithium-ion battery.
CATL's CEO says that they're at level 4 (Component/breadboard validation in lab) of 9 in terms of technology maturity. That's worse than expected at this point. There are lots of announcements of "breakthroughs", and at least two test vehicles on the road (Mercedes and Ducati), but nobody has volume manufacturing working yet.
Only if all your narritives revolve around the US. The Chinese EV industry was shaped by other things. Perhaps investigate the trajectory of battery manufacturers like CATL which were independent of Tesla.
For example in the 2010s in Shenzhen they increasingly switched to electric two-wheelers (in part due to historical bans on petrol powered motorbikes).
> The authors conclude that non-tariff barriers were a primary instrument used by China in the U.S.-China trade war, with implications for China’s trade conflicts with other countries.
I hear this about every Chinese product from steel to LLMs, but it can't be possible to run every industry at a loss at the same time, especially not for a net-creditor nation. Which Chinese industries are running the surplus that subsidizes the rest?
US bans are based on the incorrect idea that we have control over AI. But the ban only reduces the most advanced model available from US companies. Models from other countries continue development. It's as if the US decided to hit pause on competing on AI and we're just going to let someone else win it.
The US could be using these models to fix bugs and defend out systems.. but instead, we're all waiting for open source models to exceed the best unbanned model available in the US(0), and then we can all watch while attackers -- who can use any available open source model, including banned models -- to attack every US company on the internet.
US bans are a choice: a choice to lose to China; a choice to leave US companies defenseless; a choice to reduce competitiveness of the US in software. Every time a US person or company watches someone use models they are prohibited from using to achieve something US models can't, they create opposition to this ban. I can't imagine this is a sustainable policy.
0. Currently open source models are included in consideration for the "best model in the US" -- but if they're willing to ban the best from Anthropic/OpenAI, I wouldn't necessarily assume that all open source models will always be available within the US.
I agree this will slow US development but what does "win the AI race" mean? What's the finish line? If there was a finish line, say a model that met some definition of general intelligence, wouldn't other labs eventually reach it too? Does getting there 6 months sooner actually mean anything in terms of say, the 5, 20, 50, 100 year view?
This is more about having the most powerful AI company based in the US, rather than abroad. If the US pauses AI development, the rest of the world will lock in with non-US AI providers who capture the market first
> Does getting there 6 months sooner actually mean anything in terms of say, the 5, 20, 50, 100 year view?
You then use the power of AGI to keep everyone else down, economically and militarily. Billions of AGI-controlled drones patrolling the Earth and enforcing your supremacy. Yes, the future is grim and dystopian.
If one thinks this is farfetched, they aren't paying attention to geopolitics.
I keep seeing this take but it doesn't seem to account for the fact that labs are still researching and iterating, even if they aren't releasing.
And your point on "Every time a US person or company watches someone use models they are prohibited from using to achieve something US models can't" makes no sense at all. What SOTA models are others able to use that US companies are not? Zero.
According to this logic, Taiwan should keep the most advanced chips to itself, the EU should keep the most advanced chip lithography machines to itself, etc etc.
I mean, yeah they could. But what they get back for exporting is more than it is worth to them alone. Taiwan has no use for huge amounts of silicon and Europe has no use for SOTA lithography.
I don't see how that is the case with the US and leading edge AI. The US has a lot of use for that, and on balance, I cannot think of anything that is more valuable than super intelligent AI. It's basically the end game power for the human race.
Countries could try what essentially amounts to unilateral sanctions on the US to try and force sharing, but it's unlikely it would go well.
By the way, China will lock it's super smart AI in house too.
This isn't a new idea either, both the US and China have technology already that they keep to themselves.
What will happen is that the EU will start treating the US as a hostile nation, develop its own computer tech to replace American tech (probably together with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, UK, Canada, Australia) and THEN they will start denying ASML tech to the US. Bullies always think that there will be no consequences to their bullying... until they find out.
Unlike money, when I send or receive model weights over a wire, it's not a zero-sum transfer. Nothing but brute force on an almost-unimaginable scale can prevent the spread of better and better models as time goes by. Other countries can and will continue to develop them no matter what the US does.
In fact, what the US is doing now incentivizes every other country on Earth to do just that.
If we ignore the cultural issues with Americans where some places buying an EV is considered "gay" (because that is inheritently negative to them) then we can easily point to the hostile lobbying tactics and government capitulation via bought congressmen. Go look at the historical hostilities Tesla faced when first trying to take off.
If I still lived in the US, I'd be hesitant to buy an EV because the infrastructure state to state to support charging wasn't great when I was last there. In Europe, you can road trip with your EV no problem.
Let's not entirely blame consumers for not being incentivised enough. Let's face it the US has been actively against EVs. You mention subsidies, haven't those even seen regressions in EV and solar panel subsidies? It's ridiculous.
If the US government quit subsidizing oil companies and traditional automakers, there’d be more incentive to make good, affordable EVs, and more incentive for Americans to buy them.
New car sales in Europe in 2026 are approaching 50% EV with essentially none of the above. Europe has had generous EV subsidies in the past, but in 2026 those are mostly (but not completely) gone.
The average price of electricity in Europe is 29 cents. The average price in the US is 17 cents. Both have a very wide variance. I'm not sure if there's anywhere in Europe that pay more than PG&E customers in the US...
> Americans however like their gas guzzling F150s.
Pickup trucks have always made up between 10% and 20% of vehicles on the road in America; it's the SUV that has picked up from next to nothing in 1980 to almost half of all new vehicles now, while the sedan has plunged from 80% to about 25% of new vehicles today.
A big part of that transition to larger SUVs (which are not F150s) was the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards, which sought to make cars more fuel efficient. They regulated based on the size of the vehicle, so larger vehicles (including both the SUV and the F150) became cheaper to manufacture, while smaller cars were squeezed out of the market as meeting CAFE became too expensive. Larger cars also perform better on safety tests and have an easier time passing onerous safety regulations. Had environmental and safety regulations been handled differently, or if there weren't any, Americans might well be driving more fuel-efficient smaller coupes and sedans.
That said, the Chevy Bolt and Mustang Mach-E are, in fact, being manufactured—the Bolt was recently brought back, and the Mustang Mach-E was never discontinued. The Ford F150 Lightning has been discontinued. Tesla outsells all of them by far.
a study found a 500 kilogram increase in vehicle weight, which could mean the difference between an SUV and a sedan, correlated with a 70% higher fatality risk
[after the 2003 bumper height-matching standard] The likelihood of SUVs causing fatalities to drivers in other cars reduced from being 132% more likely for a collision with an SUV in the early 90s, to 28% more likely by 2016
A mere 10 centimetre increase in front-end height can elevate the risk of pedestrian death by 22%, with impacts more likely occurring at critical injury points like the chest or head
Children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared to lighter and smaller cars
> Pickup trucks have always made up between 10% and 20% of vehicles on the road in America
This is false. It's true today that sales are in that range. It is not remotely true that actual ownership is 10%-20% today nor that it was in the past
EV’s do well in parts of the U.S. with good charging infrastructure. One of the challenges is this country is huge and there are large numbers of people in places where infrastructure or other factors make it difficult to drive an EV. Probably half the people in this country live in rural areas and smaller towns where the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist and doesn’t make much sense because no one drives an EV. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
Housing is another complication that’s related to the charging situation. It’s only worthwhile to own an EV if you can charge at home. There are people who make it work with only public chargers, but it’s a major PITA. That usually means owning a home where you can install a charger. That requirement excludes a lot of people.
It’s not that everyone wants a gas guzzler. There are real challenges here.
For the most part, but who is going to get on the highway to charge their car if they weren’t already headed that way? And 50 miles is a long way to go. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to drive 100 miles to charge (and waste all that range). Just get a gas car at that point.
2/3rds of Americans live in single family homes, more if you include row houses. Some apartments have 120V in their parking spot. None of them have to get on the highway to charge.
AFAICT, that increases sales. "I better buy it now, it's going to be banned soon". Just ask the American gun manufacturers. They love announcements of bans because it provides a huge immediate boost in sales. And then in the end the ban ends up being watered down/removed, just like the European bans of combustion vehicles have been.
This US didn't really do Option 3, even, because it added EV subsidies but never removed gas subsidies. The gas subsidies in the US still tip the scale in favor of gas more so than EV subsidies were able to help counter.
4) People in China want to save money on gas, while America prefers to bitch about gas prices, while doing nothing to switch away from gas-guzzling ICE land yachts.
You've cracked the code on this one, it's not the fact that someone realized they could use labor arbitrage 50 years ago to get rich while selling the American people down the river. Treason in the name of profit.
Labor arbitrage isn't why the average personal vehicle MPG in the US is 25, but 40 in Europe.
Nobody bombed us, all our problems are self-inflicted. Reducing America's oil and energy consumption was a priority for both parties until fracking was discovered and the Republicans fully committed to setting the world on fire.
> Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes
I agree our country needs to really have some sort of revolution for the good of all humanity to force this change and overcome the entrenched interests of these greedy corporations.
Maybe we come up with a plan to drastically solve our energy and industry problems, overcome all obstacles and bring about a wonderful utopia, I bet we could do it inside of 5 years if we just gave enough power to the right people.
We could call it a 5 year plan, and listen we need broad sweeping powers to do it, otherwise malicious actors would try and subvert it. Some people wouldn't like it but that's because they aren't brave enough to do what needs to be done for the good of the workers and the proletariat. Rise up comrade let us implement the glorious 5 year plan that will free us forever from the capitalist shackles.
In your sarcasm, you seem unaware that China -- the country the OP uses as a comparison -- runs successful X-year plans under its hybrid capitalist model.
The WTO was a mistake. We should return to a GATT style trade policy where free trade is allowed (mostly) between open democratic nations with aligned security interests and goals.
I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.
> China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear.
I've said this before and I will say it again. I don't see any problem in allowing Chinese cars in the US if China manufactures them here under a 49:51 joint venture with an American company.
Also, I'm not sure how long CCP will keep on bankrolling their car companies. They are now competing with each other pushing the profits lower. Over the last year BYD stock is down 40%. Take a look at their auto manufacturers index. It peaked in November 2021 losing about 47% since then (https://www.solactive.com/index/DE000SLA0CA9/)
I want the world to be a "I trust you" place. But the world, unfortunately, has changed with everything being connected online.
If the USA government showed up at Apple and Google with guns and said "Shut down all the iOS and Android devices in France, Germany, and Japan or else", Apple and Google, AFAICT, can do that today. They could brick every iOS device and nearly every Android device. I'm actually a little surprised that more countries haven't noticed.
Similary, cars are going in the same direction. A few companies can brick every connected car they make, by region, if they want / are forced to.
I don't have a solution. I'd buy a BYD if I could as my next car and just cross my fingers it never came to that.
Software would be equated to nukes if companies and people put more time and energy into the security aspects. They cut costs for a long time by not spending on certain aspects. The does not make AI a nuclear bomb equivalent in my mind. Banning the best models makes that harder to rectify. State level hackers will have access to this technology regardless.
Unlike nukes, AI is being used in the cyber warfare realm daily, as both an offensive and defensive tool.
To play devil's advocate, there is some logic to banning Chinese cars, which is that their firmware risks sending telemetry to China, also disabling/malfunctioning the car if China were to have a military engagement with the US. I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.
An EV really shouldn't be needing to send telemetry at all. It's not a self-driving car. It would be better if the user could reliably and permanently disable it even when one's phone is connected.
The vehicle would also have to be tested to ensure that no covert or p2p radio signals can be sent to it that can signal it to shutdown or malfunction. This is very difficult to assert. There would have to exist domestic personnel who take responsibility for it.
Frankly though, Israel scares me more than China, as Israel is known to actually add remotely detonated explosives to exported consumer products.
At this point, for me it's equally scary that the US government can do that. If I can't control the firmware then I don't really care for which government my car is spying for. It's all bad
If I was American, I'd be more worried about the American government & corporations spying on me because they're the one with the power over me. If I was Chinese, I'd be more worried about the Chinese government spying on me.
I'm sure China is going to be yearning for those sweet traffic pattern data during a war. They'll know which Walmarts they need to bomb first.
It's not like there are satellites that can get high-res pictures of most of the US every few hours. Or millions of phones running all kinds of software.
Even the US-made cars have dozens of computers that run very crude C-based code, full of bugs and overflows. Security was never a priority for this code. There are so many routes of ingress that it's not even funny.
> I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.
Seems fair? What about manufacturing as well, I'm sure the US can hold these Chinese car design and manufacturing techniques with the same copyright and IP protection that China gives the US's stuff.
Umm not when the adversary is using heavy government subsidies to undercut prices and essentially take over the industry. Look at what’s happening to the European car industry, with more job losses planned by VW just this week
The irony is that China is actually good at effectively using this and getting more out of reach unit of money put in. Perhaps that is why we feel the need to label them differently, though I would also venture it is more a cultural thing. Americans tend to view subsidies as handouts and industrial policy in the Puritan values lens.
The Europeans did a very good survey of Chinese subsidies when determining what tariff to impose on Chinese cars. When data was ambiguous, they chose the higher number, and/or forced the Chinese manufacturers to refute it with hard data. They settled on 17-34%.
I actually find it funny the downvoters can't tell this was definitely LLM-assisted writing.
I'll admit it's more subtle than usual and the writer put some real work in (it wasn't just a one-shot prompt to "write tech article"). I don't even mind LLM-assisted writing if it has real content (like this article). It is a bit hypocritical though given the typical anti-AI tone.
Some sample "LLMisms", although the "AI-ness" is really at a more abstract stylistic level (eventually strong enough LLMs will eliminate all simple "LLMisms" so that only the more abstract identifiers will remain)
"a potent visual reminder of the imbalance shaping the modern EV economy."
"Xiaomi did not simply impress him. It appeared to unsettle him."
"Simultaneously, people like me have a “Neo plugged into the Matrix like a battery” sense that they and their credit cards are exactly where US industry icons, notably Elon Musk, prefer them to be."
"It’s a strange inversion: China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear. "
Cars and solar panels get hit the hardest with tariffs and restrictions.
Solar panels: [1]
Cars: [2]
More devices are being hit by US digital sovereignty rules. Most US talk about this revolves around the EU not allowing processing of data about EU citizens outside the EU. It's now a big issue for US customers, too. The US is applying it to many classes of devices. For cars, there's the “Connected Vehicles Rule”.[3] Cars can't phone home to China or some other countries. New models of DJI drones are not allowed to be imported into the US, as mentioned in the article.[4] WiFi-equipped routers have even tighter restrictions.[5]
Will this be extended to phones? "Smart" TVs? That's going to be interesting.
[1] https://www.peacocktariffconsulting.com/solar-panel-imports/
[2] https://motorwatt.com/ev-blog/howtos/importing-a-chinese-ele...
[3] https://www.hoganlovells.com/en/publications/us-bis-final-ru...
[4] https://uavcoach.com/dji-ban/
[5] https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...
Isn't this just a game? Play/obey/pretend and we will pretend back or GTFO?
I don't understand the surprise in this article. This particular story is absolutely nothing new—the Germans and Japanese did it first to the US car market, which is inefficient, stuck in a bygone era, and propped up by government protectionism. Nearly all* American cars have been backwards in all metrics since about the 1970s.
In general, if you wanted...
Reliability: Japanese. Value: Korean, French, Japanese. Performance: German, Italian, maybe every now and then British. Luxury: German, Italian, British, and depending on marque, Japanese.
And today, Chinese marques are eating everyone's lunch on every metric in the EV sector because they have seen how everyone else builds cars, lorries, and buses for a while, learnt how to do it themselves, got rid of the ICE, popped a battery in them, and have been massively undercutting the market for a while now.
* I should qualify this properly to pre-emptively stave off the ooh-rah crowd: every now and then there has been a decent A-to-B car out of the US, like the Fiesta. Additionally there are models sold purely in Europe like the Ford Mondeo.
The EV-only companies build much better EVs than companies that also build ICE cars. It took Tesla to get EVs going in the US.
It will be interesting to see if Slate's little electric pickup truck really ships at the promised price point. They're advertising and taking pre-orders. Delivery dates are vague. "Q4 2026" probably means "a few demo units". Maybe in 2027.
Incidentally, the Donut Labs solid-state battery appears to have been a scam.[1] They were supposed to ship electric motorcycles with it in Q1 2026, and we're almost into Q3. "$25 million raised from 1,300+ small investors", says Electrek. Their "solid state" battery seems to be an ordinary pouch type lithium-ion battery, no better than a good lithium-ion battery.
CATL's CEO says that they're at level 4 (Component/breadboard validation in lab) of 9 in terms of technology maturity. That's worse than expected at this point. There are lots of announcements of "breakthroughs", and at least two test vehicles on the road (Mercedes and Ducati), but nobody has volume manufacturing working yet.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/06/08/donut-lab-solid-state-battery...
[2] https://electrek.co/2026/06/25/catl-solid-state-battery-leve...
>It took Tesla to get EVs going in the US.
Tesla also helped shape the Chinese EV industry the same way how the first iPhone shaped all the other smartphone platforms.
Only if all your narritives revolve around the US. The Chinese EV industry was shaped by other things. Perhaps investigate the trajectory of battery manufacturers like CATL which were independent of Tesla.
For example in the 2010s in Shenzhen they increasingly switched to electric two-wheelers (in part due to historical bans on petrol powered motorbikes).
US only loves free market if they're the winners.
Which free-market-loving country doesn't?
EU as a whole? Did you see the number of mutually beneficial trade agreements they signed in past 15 years to promote free trade on either ends?
So does China. E.g.,
China goes beyond protectionism and even threatens other countries from doing their own strategy.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/renewables/chi...
https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/chinas-use-unoff...
> The authors conclude that non-tariff barriers were a primary instrument used by China in the U.S.-China trade war, with implications for China’s trade conflicts with other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
So does the EU
https://ahdb.org.uk/europe-market-access-and-barriers-to-tra...
Interestingly, champions of free trade come out only when the US puts in any place the tiniest of restrictions.
> And today, Chinese marques are eating everyone's lunch on every metric in the EV sector because
the industry is running at a loss, and dumping below cost products on the global markets.
I hear this about every Chinese product from steel to LLMs, but it can't be possible to run every industry at a loss at the same time, especially not for a net-creditor nation. Which Chinese industries are running the surplus that subsidizes the rest?
US bans are based on the incorrect idea that we have control over AI. But the ban only reduces the most advanced model available from US companies. Models from other countries continue development. It's as if the US decided to hit pause on competing on AI and we're just going to let someone else win it.
The US could be using these models to fix bugs and defend out systems.. but instead, we're all waiting for open source models to exceed the best unbanned model available in the US(0), and then we can all watch while attackers -- who can use any available open source model, including banned models -- to attack every US company on the internet.
US bans are a choice: a choice to lose to China; a choice to leave US companies defenseless; a choice to reduce competitiveness of the US in software. Every time a US person or company watches someone use models they are prohibited from using to achieve something US models can't, they create opposition to this ban. I can't imagine this is a sustainable policy.
0. Currently open source models are included in consideration for the "best model in the US" -- but if they're willing to ban the best from Anthropic/OpenAI, I wouldn't necessarily assume that all open source models will always be available within the US.
I agree this will slow US development but what does "win the AI race" mean? What's the finish line? If there was a finish line, say a model that met some definition of general intelligence, wouldn't other labs eventually reach it too? Does getting there 6 months sooner actually mean anything in terms of say, the 5, 20, 50, 100 year view?
This is more about having the most powerful AI company based in the US, rather than abroad. If the US pauses AI development, the rest of the world will lock in with non-US AI providers who capture the market first
> Does getting there 6 months sooner actually mean anything in terms of say, the 5, 20, 50, 100 year view?
You then use the power of AGI to keep everyone else down, economically and militarily. Billions of AGI-controlled drones patrolling the Earth and enforcing your supremacy. Yes, the future is grim and dystopian.
If one thinks this is farfetched, they aren't paying attention to geopolitics.
Never mind geopolitics, how many people still believe that AGI is just around the corner and LLMs will get us there?
I keep seeing this take but it doesn't seem to account for the fact that labs are still researching and iterating, even if they aren't releasing.
And your point on "Every time a US person or company watches someone use models they are prohibited from using to achieve something US models can't" makes no sense at all. What SOTA models are others able to use that US companies are not? Zero.
The public will get ~5.5 level models.
Private industry will essentially get ITAR access to better models, and other countries will get 5.5 with maybe some select partners getting access.
Its totally sensible that the US will keep strong AI to itself to boost its own industry.
(ITAR is a very low bar, but you need to be a citizen and your employer must fill out some forms.)
According to this logic, Taiwan should keep the most advanced chips to itself, the EU should keep the most advanced chip lithography machines to itself, etc etc.
I mean, yeah they could. But what they get back for exporting is more than it is worth to them alone. Taiwan has no use for huge amounts of silicon and Europe has no use for SOTA lithography.
I don't see how that is the case with the US and leading edge AI. The US has a lot of use for that, and on balance, I cannot think of anything that is more valuable than super intelligent AI. It's basically the end game power for the human race.
Countries could try what essentially amounts to unilateral sanctions on the US to try and force sharing, but it's unlikely it would go well.
By the way, China will lock it's super smart AI in house too.
This isn't a new idea either, both the US and China have technology already that they keep to themselves.
What will happen is that the EU will start treating the US as a hostile nation, develop its own computer tech to replace American tech (probably together with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, UK, Canada, Australia) and THEN they will start denying ASML tech to the US. Bullies always think that there will be no consequences to their bullying... until they find out.
Its totally sensible that the US will keep strong AI to itself to boost its own industry.
No, it isn't. What in the world would lead you to think that will be an option?
Anything we develop can and will be duplicated elsewhere and distributed widely.
If I told you money gets disturbed widely, you would obviously balk.
So what could possibly lead you to think power will be distributed widely?
Unlike money, when I send or receive model weights over a wire, it's not a zero-sum transfer. Nothing but brute force on an almost-unimaginable scale can prevent the spread of better and better models as time goes by. Other countries can and will continue to develop them no matter what the US does.
In fact, what the US is doing now incentivizes every other country on Earth to do just that.
“Private industry” as defined by Musk, Ellison, Kushner and Trump.
Im so sick of winning. Im so happy for the future of the US and humanity. Yey tech bros.
>Americans watch the rest of the world getting better, cheaper, ...
If we wanted cheap cars, there needs to be demand to justify building giga factories of EVs.
There just wasnt sufficient consumer demand to justify the giga factory investments
China CAN generate demand for EVs because they have the political ability to
1) force gas restricted cars to only drive on certain days of the week
2) create a brutal lottery to get a license plate to legally drive a gas car
3) provide a bunch of subsidies
The US has only done option 3.
Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes
If we ignore the cultural issues with Americans where some places buying an EV is considered "gay" (because that is inheritently negative to them) then we can easily point to the hostile lobbying tactics and government capitulation via bought congressmen. Go look at the historical hostilities Tesla faced when first trying to take off.
If I still lived in the US, I'd be hesitant to buy an EV because the infrastructure state to state to support charging wasn't great when I was last there. In Europe, you can road trip with your EV no problem.
Let's not entirely blame consumers for not being incentivised enough. Let's face it the US has been actively against EVs. You mention subsidies, haven't those even seen regressions in EV and solar panel subsidies? It's ridiculous.
If the US government quit subsidizing oil companies and traditional automakers, there’d be more incentive to make good, affordable EVs, and more incentive for Americans to buy them.
"Americans where some places buying an EV is considered "gay""
They would jump on EVs in heartbeat if Trump told them to.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/trump-musk-tesla-whit...
Don’t forget…
New car sales in Europe in 2026 are approaching 50% EV with essentially none of the above. Europe has had generous EV subsidies in the past, but in 2026 those are mostly (but not completely) gone.
4) add taxes to effectively double price of gasoline
The price of electricity in Europe is also approximately double that of the US.
This is not true, it varies widely between countries, just as it varies between states in the US.
The average price of electricity in Europe is 29 cents. The average price in the US is 17 cents. Both have a very wide variance. I'm not sure if there's anywhere in Europe that pay more than PG&E customers in the US...
Youre right, i forgot to add
4) europeans are environemtally conscious
Americans however like their gas guzzling F150s.
The reason I did the original comment was I know for a time the major car companies did a huge push into EVs.
Like the ford 150 lightning, chevy bolt and mustang mach E. But they stopped manufacturing them due to weakened sales and profitability.
Its a vicious feedback loop of consumer adoption, high car prices, and capital investment which makes us feel stuck
*edit this is based on what I heard from a GM exec during a lecture visit while at UofM
> Americans however like their gas guzzling F150s.
Pickup trucks have always made up between 10% and 20% of vehicles on the road in America; it's the SUV that has picked up from next to nothing in 1980 to almost half of all new vehicles now, while the sedan has plunged from 80% to about 25% of new vehicles today.
A big part of that transition to larger SUVs (which are not F150s) was the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards, which sought to make cars more fuel efficient. They regulated based on the size of the vehicle, so larger vehicles (including both the SUV and the F150) became cheaper to manufacture, while smaller cars were squeezed out of the market as meeting CAFE became too expensive. Larger cars also perform better on safety tests and have an easier time passing onerous safety regulations. Had environmental and safety regulations been handled differently, or if there weren't any, Americans might well be driving more fuel-efficient smaller coupes and sedans.
That said, the Chevy Bolt and Mustang Mach-E are, in fact, being manufactured—the Bolt was recently brought back, and the Mustang Mach-E was never discontinued. The Ford F150 Lightning has been discontinued. Tesla outsells all of them by far.
> Larger cars also perform better on safety tests
That's only true if we're limiting the discussion to the safety of the people inside said car. Quoting one of the first sources I could find: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/06/big-cars-feel-...
a study found a 500 kilogram increase in vehicle weight, which could mean the difference between an SUV and a sedan, correlated with a 70% higher fatality risk
[after the 2003 bumper height-matching standard] The likelihood of SUVs causing fatalities to drivers in other cars reduced from being 132% more likely for a collision with an SUV in the early 90s, to 28% more likely by 2016
A mere 10 centimetre increase in front-end height can elevate the risk of pedestrian death by 22%, with impacts more likely occurring at critical injury points like the chest or head
Children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared to lighter and smaller cars
> Pickup trucks have always made up between 10% and 20% of vehicles on the road in America
This is false. It's true today that sales are in that range. It is not remotely true that actual ownership is 10%-20% today nor that it was in the past
I don't think the jump in EV sales in Europe are primarily driven by environment consciousness.
The jump in EV sales this year are primarily driven by seeing what a psycho in the US whitehouse can immediately do to gasoline prices.
Gasoline only comes from one source., and is largely delivered around the world by shipping.
Electricity is able to be generated by many means, and is available everywhere.
I know several people in modest suburban homes, who generate all of their own electricity, including driving two EVs.
The supply chain can be very short.
There is no other form of energy that can deliver the individual and national energy independence that can be delivered by electricity.
Gasoline and petroleum in general can never, ever, ever, deliver this degree of autonomy.
I think a large part of it is just EV's getting good & cheap. You can get a quite good EV for £15,000 now.
The major US car companies pulled back some on EVs mostly because of hostility toward EVs from the Trump administration.
EV’s do well in parts of the U.S. with good charging infrastructure. One of the challenges is this country is huge and there are large numbers of people in places where infrastructure or other factors make it difficult to drive an EV. Probably half the people in this country live in rural areas and smaller towns where the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist and doesn’t make much sense because no one drives an EV. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
Housing is another complication that’s related to the charging situation. It’s only worthwhile to own an EV if you can charge at home. There are people who make it work with only public chargers, but it’s a major PITA. That usually means owning a home where you can install a charger. That requirement excludes a lot of people.
It’s not that everyone wants a gas guzzler. There are real challenges here.
99% of the American population lives within 50 miles of an Interstate. All of the interstates have good fast charger coverage in 2026.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/dmmgl5/78_of_the_c...
Edit: that link is awful. So my 99% claim is also likely off a bit too. But I bet it's not off by a lot.
For the most part, but who is going to get on the highway to charge their car if they weren’t already headed that way? And 50 miles is a long way to go. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to drive 100 miles to charge (and waste all that range). Just get a gas car at that point.
2/3rds of Americans live in single family homes, more if you include row houses. Some apartments have 120V in their parking spot. None of them have to get on the highway to charge.
Hum... Announcing you will completely outlaw combustion cars soon is missing from the GP's options.
AFAICT, that increases sales. "I better buy it now, it's going to be banned soon". Just ask the American gun manufacturers. They love announcements of bans because it provides a huge immediate boost in sales. And then in the end the ban ends up being watered down/removed, just like the European bans of combustion vehicles have been.
This US didn't really do Option 3, even, because it added EV subsidies but never removed gas subsidies. The gas subsidies in the US still tip the scale in favor of gas more so than EV subsidies were able to help counter.
They don't have the political will because doing (1) and (2) would result in the removal of whatever politicians approved it.
4) People in China want to save money on gas, while America prefers to bitch about gas prices, while doing nothing to switch away from gas-guzzling ICE land yachts.
You've cracked the code on this one, it's not the fact that someone realized they could use labor arbitrage 50 years ago to get rich while selling the American people down the river. Treason in the name of profit.
Labor arbitrage as treason is a very interesting idea. It's a major reason why China is as developed as it is now.
Labor arbitrage isn't why the average personal vehicle MPG in the US is 25, but 40 in Europe.
Nobody bombed us, all our problems are self-inflicted. Reducing America's oil and energy consumption was a priority for both parties until fracking was discovered and the Republicans fully committed to setting the world on fire.
*after further research it seems option 1 is really limited to tier 1 and tier 2 cities(1/3) of the population
> Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes
I agree our country needs to really have some sort of revolution for the good of all humanity to force this change and overcome the entrenched interests of these greedy corporations.
Maybe we come up with a plan to drastically solve our energy and industry problems, overcome all obstacles and bring about a wonderful utopia, I bet we could do it inside of 5 years if we just gave enough power to the right people.
We could call it a 5 year plan, and listen we need broad sweeping powers to do it, otherwise malicious actors would try and subvert it. Some people wouldn't like it but that's because they aren't brave enough to do what needs to be done for the good of the workers and the proletariat. Rise up comrade let us implement the glorious 5 year plan that will free us forever from the capitalist shackles.
In your sarcasm, you seem unaware that China -- the country the OP uses as a comparison -- runs successful X-year plans under its hybrid capitalist model.
The WTO was a mistake. We should return to a GATT style trade policy where free trade is allowed (mostly) between open democratic nations with aligned security interests and goals.
I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.
I’d wager you’re more right than wrong.
It's far from ebullience. It's the fear of a younger and more competent workforce.
Nice shout-out to Aptera in the middle of this article.
Aptera has built a working, production-intent solar EV. Recent tests showed it charging up to 46 miles per day from the sun alone.
Reservation referral link with discount: https://frequal.com/aptera/reserve.html
Opening the way for foreign competition.
> China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear.
Spot on
How did the Xiaomi SU7 get imported when it's not street or registration legal? How can I try this out?
Also: This is a tenant of fascism. They're restricting imports to protect their own members.
I've said this before and I will say it again. I don't see any problem in allowing Chinese cars in the US if China manufactures them here under a 49:51 joint venture with an American company.
Also, I'm not sure how long CCP will keep on bankrolling their car companies. They are now competing with each other pushing the profits lower. Over the last year BYD stock is down 40%. Take a look at their auto manufacturers index. It peaked in November 2021 losing about 47% since then (https://www.solactive.com/index/DE000SLA0CA9/)
I want the world to be a "I trust you" place. But the world, unfortunately, has changed with everything being connected online.
If the USA government showed up at Apple and Google with guns and said "Shut down all the iOS and Android devices in France, Germany, and Japan or else", Apple and Google, AFAICT, can do that today. They could brick every iOS device and nearly every Android device. I'm actually a little surprised that more countries haven't noticed.
Similary, cars are going in the same direction. A few companies can brick every connected car they make, by region, if they want / are forced to.
I don't have a solution. I'd buy a BYD if I could as my next car and just cross my fingers it never came to that.
The administration disagrees with you, having just banned the made in South Carolina PoleStar vehicles
It's unfortunate indeed.
The U.S. needs the domestic automotive industry to remain viable as vehicle manufacturing is a dual-use technology.
Still the best place for Clean, Beautiful, Coal. Can't argue with that.
It’s been like this for a while. Take a technology, call it a weapon and control it. Same playbook.
denying my godgiven right to recreational nukes is blatant infringement on my rights!
Software would be equated to nukes if companies and people put more time and energy into the security aspects. They cut costs for a long time by not spending on certain aspects. The does not make AI a nuclear bomb equivalent in my mind. Banning the best models makes that harder to rectify. State level hackers will have access to this technology regardless.
Unlike nukes, AI is being used in the cyber warfare realm daily, as both an offensive and defensive tool.
To play devil's advocate, there is some logic to banning Chinese cars, which is that their firmware risks sending telemetry to China, also disabling/malfunctioning the car if China were to have a military engagement with the US. I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.
An EV really shouldn't be needing to send telemetry at all. It's not a self-driving car. It would be better if the user could reliably and permanently disable it even when one's phone is connected.
The vehicle would also have to be tested to ensure that no covert or p2p radio signals can be sent to it that can signal it to shutdown or malfunction. This is very difficult to assert. There would have to exist domestic personnel who take responsibility for it.
Frankly though, Israel scares me more than China, as Israel is known to actually add remotely detonated explosives to exported consumer products.
At this point, for me it's equally scary that the US government can do that. If I can't control the firmware then I don't really care for which government my car is spying for. It's all bad
If I was American, I'd be more worried about the American government & corporations spying on me because they're the one with the power over me. If I was Chinese, I'd be more worried about the Chinese government spying on me.
That's completely true, but it's not that simple, because technically we need to worry about both, one as an individual, and the other as a nation.
I'm sure China is going to be yearning for those sweet traffic pattern data during a war. They'll know which Walmarts they need to bomb first.
It's not like there are satellites that can get high-res pictures of most of the US every few hours. Or millions of phones running all kinds of software.
Even the US-made cars have dozens of computers that run very crude C-based code, full of bugs and overflows. Security was never a priority for this code. There are so many routes of ingress that it's not even funny.
> I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.
Seems fair? What about manufacturing as well, I'm sure the US can hold these Chinese car design and manufacturing techniques with the same copyright and IP protection that China gives the US's stuff.
Then make a regulation that every firmware that runs on car needs to be open sourced.
Banning isn't a good solution, we should create healthy competition.
Umm not when the adversary is using heavy government subsidies to undercut prices and essentially take over the industry. Look at what’s happening to the European car industry, with more job losses planned by VW just this week
This argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.
- The Polestar vehicles most recently banned are made in Charleston SC
- Fossil fuel industries in the US receive huge subsidies
- Non-Chinese brands (Hyundai/ Kia) produce models with similar pricing
This is a tired argument. When China does it it’s subsidies, when other countries do it it’s called industrial policy.
The irony is that China is actually good at effectively using this and getting more out of reach unit of money put in. Perhaps that is why we feel the need to label them differently, though I would also venture it is more a cultural thing. Americans tend to view subsidies as handouts and industrial policy in the Puritan values lens.
Effective Chinese subsidy per vehicle is lower than the $7000 per vehicle the US had in place.
Is that even knowable? The Chinese economy is very opaque.
The Europeans did a very good survey of Chinese subsidies when determining what tariff to impose on Chinese cars. When data was ambiguous, they chose the higher number, and/or forced the Chinese manufacturers to refute it with hard data. They settled on 17-34%.
Isn't that the market strategy of silicon valley companies? Sell at a loss, capture the whole market and then inflate prices
Why does it matter whether the subsidies come from a government, from venture capitalists, or from private equity?
Journalists used to decry the use of LLMs. Now they use it freely to write their own articles.
I actually find it funny the downvoters can't tell this was definitely LLM-assisted writing.
I'll admit it's more subtle than usual and the writer put some real work in (it wasn't just a one-shot prompt to "write tech article"). I don't even mind LLM-assisted writing if it has real content (like this article). It is a bit hypocritical though given the typical anti-AI tone.
Some sample "LLMisms", although the "AI-ness" is really at a more abstract stylistic level (eventually strong enough LLMs will eliminate all simple "LLMisms" so that only the more abstract identifiers will remain)
"a potent visual reminder of the imbalance shaping the modern EV economy."
"Xiaomi did not simply impress him. It appeared to unsettle him."
"Simultaneously, people like me have a “Neo plugged into the Matrix like a battery” sense that they and their credit cards are exactly where US industry icons, notably Elon Musk, prefer them to be."
"It’s a strange inversion: China increasingly resembles the competitive capitalist system Americans were taught to admire, while the US appears to embrace the controlled “kickback” economy we were told to fear. "