I'm not sure what TFA but taking the quote here at face value I think there's a little more to it than that. Not all of these Chinese automakers have these so-called deeper structural advantages. As I mentioned before and the WSJ reported, one of them (and I'm sure there are others) built a factory where (even if there was no human labor) they expected to push out 100,000 cars/annually yet have orders for less than 1,000. So no amount of structural advantage matters for them, nor do those advantages matter when the chief export markets say "no thanks we'll just keep our industry even if it's less efficient".
There are a few other things to note here. First is time - so even if the subsidies which still exist and are rather significant (Imagine at like Google's scale if they're making $100bn/year and the government was paying them or subsidizing $10bn of that - that's a lot of $$$) matter less so now, they still were used to spring up the industry and many of these automakers which has downstream effects on viability of the company and in what has been widely reported as over-building of industrial capacity. Coupled with a declining Chinese market, no access to the American market, and soon to be little to no access to the European market China could build cars for $5 but if there are no buyers and they're not making a profit it doesn't matter. Plus China of course artificially devalues its currency to boost exports.
My point here isn't that China is bad or that Chinese automakers aren't or can't be great, but that there's a good reason we have protected our domestic markets and even if Chinese companies were eventually just the best, fastest, cheapest, most advanced in the world we would just protect our markets until we catch up because having a domestic industry and those jobs and the capability to produce wheeled vehicles is more important than having the cheapest possible EVs. Ergo that's why we have tariffs. Disagreeing with that direction is a failure of understanding. The policy is a must-have.
Other countries may not care or their people may not understand why we do what we do, but those countries aren't relevant players on the global stage and their industrial capacity if it ever existed doesn't matter. American industrial capacity, Chinese industrial capacity, and probably German, Japanese, Korea, and maybe a few other select countries are the only ones that matter in this regard.
The Atlantic ran a story a week or so ago which over-indexes a bit but I think is directionally accurate and is relevant here[1].
"According to the London-based research firm Capital Economics, the share of Chinese industrial firms that are losing money has doubled since 2018 to 30 percent this year."
“But as the economy has slumped in recent years, the strain on Chinese companies has increased and their finances have deteriorated. Total net profit at 5,400 Chinese companies listed on local stock exchanges fell for the third consecutive year in 2025, according to data from Nikkei Asia, a Japanese business news outlet. Excess factory capacity and weak domestic demand have created a brutal competition for shoppers, and the resulting price wars have narrowed profit margins.”
"Facing an unstable job market and slumping property prices, Chinese consumers are reluctant to shop—car sales, for instance, in China have plunged by more than 20 percent so far this year."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/10/chinese-co...
Using subsidies to spring up an industry is a good thing. Over in the US we had plenty of big car makers that didn't need it, and their being lazy because they know they'll be protected is the worst of all worlds.
Domestic production is good but sometimes big companies need to taste failure. We should lower the level of protection they're getting, at least for a while.
Sure but that means the US should do things like subsidize American companies (leftists are against this of course) while keeping Chinese ones out until we have competitors who are sufficiently advanced, and then…… China just open its market to American companies that we subsidized?
The key piece I think is missing here is reciprocity.
We can’t have “China subsidies its industries until they are super competitive and then they get to sell in our market but we don’t get to sell in theirs”. Europe does a little of the same with regulatory lawfare.
The problem with lowering the level of protectionism is that it doesn’t really serve anyone’s best interest besides Chinese automakers. American companies lose out, American workers lose out, and we wind up in a worse position than before.
We could subsidize smaller companies, perhaps.
The big US car companies don't need subsidies. They can afford plenty of development costs but they don't want to advance into the cheaper electric space, they want to extract as much value as they can by pushing car prices as high as possible.
The problem with keeping this level of protectionism is that it encourages them to keep doing the same thing. The companies don't lose out but everyone in the US that needs to buy a car loses out. We need something to motivate them, and dropping their protection from "infinite" to "medium" or "medium-high" might do the trick.
I'm in favor of solutions which give American automakers advantages and also motivation to build better cars, but it has to be done in a way that keeps China out of our market, and protects union jobs.
I think it's fine that cars are expensive and getting more expensive. More people should be walking or using alternative means anyway because we spend way too much money and are dealing with a number of negative externalities from our car-only infrastructure. Having competition in terms of method of transportation itself can solve many of our problems, no artificially cheap Chinese cars required.
I drive an EV and generally prefer that to ICE vehicles but we have to acknowledge that there are still emissions that go in to EV manufacturing and mining rare earths, which China created a strong monopoly on the processing of so we'll have to do more ICE to compensate, sucks. There seems to be a desire to push cheaper EVs on to the American market, but it's even cheaper to build sidewalks and live closer to your place of employment or where you do the majority of your daily activities. It's better for the environment too.
So if we can't build EVs in a way that is advantageous to us and on our terms, we should avoid it and just walk and build transit and keep the ICE going.
Making cars expensive is probably the worst way to accomplish those goals though. Better zoning, funding transit, taxing emissions get more directly at the problems with less collateral damage.
I think we’ve tried that and people generally just go with the small, externalized cost. Having to pay more of the costs directly and shortening the feedback loop so people can make more informed decisions I think tends to work well. It’s like climate change - gas should probably be $20/gallon if we were accounting for the costs to the environment and such.
Either way artificially cheaper cars from China doesn’t solve our problems in the long term. Obviously once your country loses its ability to build cars they just raise the prices and you’re back to where you started except now you have lost union jobs and manufacturing ability and know how.