Oliver Johnson
President Biden’s move to quadruple tariffs The adoption of Chinese electric vehicles is not intended to prevent any potential threats to national security posed by Chinese-made internet-connected vehicles, but some political leaders in the president’s own party think these concerns should not be ignored.
The tariff increase was designed to prevent China from undercutting U.S. automakers with a flood of electric vehicles that cost a fraction of those produced by American companies. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and other Democrats have urged the president to ban Chinese electric vehicles entirely because they fear Chinese-made consumer devices could be used to harm Americans through hacking or espionage.
Brown’s state of Ohio is a major production hub for U.S. automakers, and he reiterated that call after the tariff announcement.
“Connected vehicles and technology made in China have the power to transmit Americans’ personal data and information to the Chinese Communist Party – a clear threat to national security,” Brown told CBS News in a statement. “The Biden administration must ban Chinese connected vehicles and Chinese smart vehicle technology and fight back against China’s pressure to infiltrate the American auto supply chain.”
Brown argues that EV technology could allow China to collect information about traffic patterns, critical infrastructure and drivers’ lives, Brown says. China, he points out, does not allow US-made vehicles near its government buildings.
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, the nation’s automobile capital, expressed similar concerns.
“Thousands of Chinese-made connected vehicles entering the country would give [the Chinese] a huge amount of data – high-fidelity data on things like U.S. military bases, key infrastructure installations like bridges and power grid nodes, secret locations, individual leaders,” she said in comments on the House floor in early May .
Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served as an intelligence and defense official in the Bush and Obama administrations, went on to say that she raised the issue with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who she said agreed with her because it would provide detailed information on the potential adversary. that could be used to target US infrastructure or even leaders. She said the U.S. does not have any kind of national security lens to scrutinize imported Chinese cars, including those produced in Mexico.
Some Republicans have also supported tariff increases on Chinese-made electric vehicles, including Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has long expressed concerns about TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
Mr. Biden on Tuesday tariffs announced on Chinese EVs will quadruple the current tariff rate from 25% to 100% as the administration tries to stop China from harming American companies and threatening union jobs in manufacturing. Chinese automakers, with their government’s support and cheap labor and supplies, could flood Western markets with vehicles as cheap as $10,000 to $12,000, about a third of the price of American EVs. But these prices would be higher in the US due to tariffs. Globally, the Chinese company BYD overtook Tesla to become the largest electric car company in the world in the last quarter of 2023.
There are few EVs made in China that are currently sold in the US. Chinese-backed Swedish automaker Volvo produces one of them, the Polestar. But Volvo only sold around 9,000 Polar Stars – outside the more than 812,000 EVs which were sold in the US in 2022. Volvo is also launching another car, the EX30, which will be sold in the US as early as this summer and will likely have a relatively low price despite the increase in tariffs.
The administration is trying to prevent the U.S. from imitating Europe, where Chinese EVs quickly came to account for about 20% of the market share, but it is not considering banning Chinese-made EVs.
Steve Weymouth, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business who studies the smart car industry, said the new tariffs address the economics of national security but don’t necessarily make inroads into privacy and espionage issues. Weymouth said Internet-connected vehicles collect data like speed and routes, “things you would imagine your insurance company would want.” But they “also integrate cameras, microphones and other sensors in a way that can really increase surveillance capabilities,” he said.
During an Atlantic Council chat in January, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that Chinese electric vehicles pose serious national security risks, saying that electric vehicles and self-driving cars collect “enormous amounts of sensitive data ” about drivers.
Cars “collect enormous amounts of sensitive data about drivers — personal information, biometric information, where the car goes,” Raimondo said. “So it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how a foreign adversary like China, with access to this kind of information on a massive scale, could pose a serious risk to our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens.”
However, there is another important factor that the government is concerned about.
“There are policies in China that require a company to share data with the Chinese government for specific reasons,” Weymouth said, unlike the U.S., which has safeguards such as requirements for court-issued warrants for such information that “is simply not present in China.” .”
The new tariff hikes result from U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s years-long review of Trump-era tariffs on China under Section 301, which authorizes the president to impose tariffs when a foreign government violates international trade agreements or unreasonably overcharges US trade.
Its investigation concluded that China continues to use unfair trade practices. In March, the president announced that the Commerce Department would open a separate investigation into Chinese-made “smart cars,” citing national security risks.
“We don’t have a specific position on this,” the senior administration official said of national security concerns. “I think these sets of actions are very focused on just the 301 statutory review. That has been completed, and they are narrowly focused on several tariffs that are important to protect workers and industry within U.S. strategic sectors, as opposed to any broader and bigger thing for now.”
