Quote:Some of China’s biggest automakers are looking to skirt United States tariffs and flood the nation’s auto market with cheap Electric Vehicles (EVs) — a move that would further crush American auto workers and the domestic plants where they work.

According to Automotive News, Chinese-owned Volvo Cars is hoping to use the little-known Duty Drawback Program to “recoup import duties and the 25 percent U.S. tariff assessed on the Chinese-made Volvo EX30 crossover and Polestar 2 sedan against exports of the U.S.-made Volvo EX90 and Polestar 3 crossovers.”

General Motors (GM) has been using the Duty Drawback Program for years to mitigate United States tariffs on its Chinese-made Buick Envision Crossover.

Dr. Kent Kaiser, executive director of Trade Alliance to Promote Prosperity, detailed to Breitbart News how many Chinese companies already circumvent United States tariffs and thus dump highly-subsidized cheap products in the market.

“Our research indicates that Sunsong and other Chinese firms employ fraudulent transshipping to obscure the origin of their auto-part products and skirt U.S. tariffs,” Kaiser said. “This practice floods the U.S market with Chinese Communist Party-subsidized goods that disadvantage American manufacturers and bolster a company integral to China’s economic expansion.”

“Amid China’s growing global aggression, preserving tariff integrity is imperative,” Kaiser said. “Ensuring vigilant oversight and enforcement … is essential to protect Americans. Federal agencies have acted on such cases before, but more must be done to ensure violators of U.S law face consequences.”

As Breitbart News has chronicled, Chinese automakers have sought to take advantage of President Joe Biden’s rapid green energy push that has yet to secure domestic manufacturing capacity and the critical minerals necessary to build EV batteries.

China, meanwhile, has made tremendous gains in the global auto industry. Sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and European nations following its invasion of Ukraine have helped make China the world’s biggest exporter of cars.

Likewise, China controls the supply chains of minerals such as nickel, graphite, lithium, and cobalt that are needed to make EV batteries.

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If that happens, its the US Automakers own fault. They have been purposely curtailing production levels in order to keep inventory low---and prices unnaturally high. Furthermore, American auto makes have virtually stopped making lower priced cars and concentrated on largely only producing higher end vehicles packed with options that generate the highest profit margins. The under 20K new economy car in America has essentially vanished from the scene. This strategy has been hugely profitable to US car makers---and has also had the unintended consequence of driving up used car prices as well (since new car production has been reduced and many car buyers cannot afford the fancy loaded up inventory available at local new car dealerships--the demand for used cars has sky rocketed).

I said eventually a foreign carmaker would use this as an opportunity to enter the US market in a big way like the Japanese did in the 1970's and the Koreans did in the 1980's. If car makers ignore a large segment of the new car buying public (perhaps even the majority of the new car market) for going on 3 years----they have no right to complain when someone else comes in to scoop up that ignored market. During the 1970's, during a period of high gas prices, Detroit continued producing lower quality big V8's that drank gasoline---creating the opening for the Japanese to build market share with their reliable economically priced cars with smaller gas sipping engines. With America's major auto makers having vacated the lower to middle class economy car market for the last 3 years, the stage is now set for another foreign auto maker to enter the US market. I actually thought it might be India or another Korean auto maker---but yeah---it could be China.

US automakers are game players and scammers. No respect for them. They have created their own problems and still need bailouts (subsidies) to survive. The epitome of what’s wrong with American capitalism. More has been done to subsidize a company like GM than almost any other area of the economy.

About the only area in which they choose to “compete” are in large vehicles that are in part protected by tariffs on much of the competition.