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.
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.
An engine would scrap for more than $100 you’ll have to cite that figure to make it believable.
Last I checked the whole car scrapped for $250, and there is a lot more metal in the rest of the car (transmission, drive train…) than the engine.
Engines are worth more than $100 if they are rebuild-able. However the incremental cost to the automaker is less than $100. Remember, incremental cost does not include the cost of engineering, setting up the assembly line, or profit margin (which are all very expensive and raise the actual cost) - just the raw materials and labor to run the line.
No citations and more outlandish claims. So I’ll put a little math here. From the first google results aluminum scraps around $0.44/lb and a smaller engine block is about 300lb which comes out to $132, not including heads manifolds, pistons etc.
The engine has hundreds of parts but really only a couple of them are moving. That’s the beauty of electric motors.
They’re comparing against the price of an ICE engine and the fact that they don’t contain one to offset the cost.
But they do have an expensive electric motor instead of the ICE, plus an expensive battery.
Electric motors are substantially cheaper (and simpler, and lighter) than internal combustion. Hell, the typical ICE has two electric motors already in it! (starter, alternator)
Electric motors are substantially cheaper (and simpler, and lighter) than internal combustion
Not really. There is a lot of metal - wires - in the electric motor. Retail prices on motors is a lot higher than the retail price on an ICE. https://www.grainger.com/product/WEG-IEEE-841-Motor-250-HP-15G092 is a 250 horse power motor for $30k. https://www.jegs.com/i/Chevrolet-Performance/809/19435110/10002/-1 is a 500 horsepower ICE (I think this is new, but the site also sells rebuilt engines) for $7k.
Of course with motors there are a number of different ways to built them at different costs. However they are not cheaper than an ICE and we shouldn’t expect that they would be as there is a lot of metal in a motor.
the typical ICE has two electric motors already in it! (starter, alternator)
Sure, but they are small, neither one is capable of moving your car down the road at full speed (the starter might do it for 10 seconds but then it will overheat)
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.
Okay, fair. I was not aware of that.
Thank you!
Just adding: Wikipedia has a nice article including a map showing the current status of when countries plan to phase out fossil fuel vehicles. It also has a section on which manufacturers have pledged to do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles
Long term politics seem to be a really good strategy for this. Notice how USA is marked as green, even if its only some states who have agreed to do so, and some countries are just grey. However, this is fine, because the manufacturers will still need to make the switch long beforehand in order to keep selling vehicles worldwide.
Tariffs are the most straightforward way to deal with dumping. Hard to fault the EU for this approach.
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 :/
No one said it would solve it. Using ICE cars will make it worse.
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
These are in addition to the existing 10% car tariff.
Also keep in mind that there are large car registration taxes and VAT in Europe. While this applies to all cars imported or not, it does increase the difference in net price.
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.
China subsidies vehicles, say €5000
EU tariffs vehicles, say €5000
Every vehicle purchase basically comes with €5000 from the Chinese government for the EU government
The CCP doesn’t want you to know this one simple trick
BYD+18% or a too expensive European car, I know what I’ll get. Anyway, we don’t have cars fully “made in France” here, car makers should be ashamed of themselves as they mostly rely on those taxes to prevent competition.
Boy oh boy, is that ever not enough if they want to stop Chinese EVS. They’ll need a 200% tariff just to compete with Chinese EV prices.
And those Chinese EVS are exceeding European/American Auto safety standards.
$9700, $11,000, $15,000 USD for a new car
https://electrek.co/2024/03/06/byd-launches-cheaper-seagull-ev-9700-price/
Shut the fuck up about China having closer ties with Russia then.
This is such bullshit. The EU is supposed to be encouraging EV adoption. There’s a market NOW for affordable EVs it will take years for European car companies to get into. The EU needs to help these companies produce affordable EVs faster, not block Chinese companies from providing a solution in the meantime. Climate change is already a crisis. We need to be doing everything possible to reduce its escalating effects.
