GM
General Motors Company
stock NYSE

That's a much more reasonable concern than simply saying “Chinese car = spy device.”
Connected vehicles absolutely create privacy and national-security questions. Cameras, GPS, cellular connectivity, driver-assistance systems and other sensors can generate enormous amounts of data, and I understand why the US would want strict rules governing where that data goes and who can remotely access the vehicle.
But I don't think this is inherently a Chinese-car problem. It's a connected-car problem.
The FTC has already taken action against GM and OnStar over allegations involving the collection and sale of precise geolocation and driving-behavior data from millions of American vehicles. So American cars can create serious data-privacy problems too.
The important distinction, in my view, is between regulating the data and simply banning the product because of its nationality. If a Chinese automaker wants to sell cars in a country, require local data storage where appropriate, cybersecurity audits, restrictions on remote access, transparency about what the cameras and sensors collect, and compliance with that country's privacy laws.
If a particular manufacturer can't comply with those requirements, then that's a concrete security problem. But “this car has cameras and LiDAR, therefore Beijing is mapping everything within 100 feet of it” requires evidence of what is actually being collected, transmitted and accessed.
Otherwise we'd have to ask the same privacy questions about every highly connected vehicle on the road, regardless of whether the badge says BYD, GM, Ford, Tesla or something else.

That's actually the historical comparison I had in mind when I wrote the post.
Japanese competition exposed a real weakness in Detroit's product strategy, especially when American consumers suddenly cared much more about fuel economy and smaller cars. Detroit eventually improved enormously in quality, but today the Big Three have largely retreated from several mainstream passenger-car segments where Toyota and Honda remained strong.
What makes the Chinese situation interesting to me is that the competitive pressure doesn't disappear just because those cars are kept out of the US. BYD, Geely and others can continue competing against GM, Ford and Stellantis in Brazil, Europe, Southeast Asia and other markets.
So Detroit could remain very profitable at home selling trucks and large SUVs while simultaneously losing competitiveness elsewhere in smaller EVs, affordable EVs and PHEVs.
That's the part that makes me wonder whether protection is buying Detroit time to catch up, or simply delaying the moment when it has to respond to the same kind of competitive pressure that Japanese manufacturers created decades ago.

Protectionism is a useful tool for infant industries that has been used since the industrial revolution to protect domestic production. The problem is GM, Ford, Chevy and the like are not infant industries, they don't give a shit about the US economy and it's national security beyond their own share prices and profit margins. 
As a result of this, any US protectionism is used purely to stifle competition, not to actually innovate or gain a foothold in new markets like it has in China. This is what happens when protectionism is done to prop up failing businesses. You get companies that are unable to innovate because resting on their laurels has become their bread and butter instead of competing.  

The domestic US auto industry is a pickup truck industry that makes cars as a money-losing hobby, thanks to mix of chicken tax (banning imported trucks) and the weird math of the CAFE standards (that makes cheap light pickups technically unfeasible), and the fact that everybody else can make cheaper, better cars. And the fact that rednecks love their F-150s and Dodge Rams, and will into debt to buy them.
Pickups are 50% of GM's profits, and 80% of Ford's. Large SUVs are 45% of GM's profits, and 15% of Ford's. Cars are under 5% of each brand's profits.
Basically, Ford's and GM's profits already sit in a protected bubble.
An influx of Chinese imported cars, assuming the truck/car balance doesn't shift, would seem to hurt the companies that actually sell cars: Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Tesla, BMW, VVW, Nissan.
The overlap I see with China's EVs is Ford's SUV division (45% of profits).
Ford and GM could innovate more in the mini-pickup category, where CAFE would no longer apply (small trucks would be allowed), but which are still protected by chicken tax.

As an American, I'd rather buy a cheap Chinese EV than a car/SUV, from GM or Ford. There's like 6 actual car models still available for sale in the US - it's all SUVs, trucks, and crossovers. There's like 2 minivan models left. The US vehicle market is so cringe.

lmao gotta love this dumb takes that are completely ignorant on a subject and end with "you're uneducated on the subject" hahaha
First and foremost, I don't have time to correct all the propaganda that you're repeating (everything that you have said is factually wrong), but I'm just going to tell you what's actually happening in the real world:
All the western car companies work in China, all of them, all of them are designing, building, exporting and selling in China, even for a couple of them China is their biggest and most important market, for most of them all of their progress in electrification comes from their China's ventures and developments
All of these western car makers have Chinese models, they're usually cheaper and more technologically advanced, they sell these cars not only in China, but all over the world, and lately they have been so good that they're the best sellers in the markets they're sold, and not only that, GM is starting to build their Chinese models now outside of China, starting this year they'll build the Aveo and the Groove in Mexico, because they're just better than their US models, and their best sellers by much
I could list every western company and how they're growing thanks to their partnerships and business in China, Toyota, VW, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Tesla, you name it.
All the propaganda you're parroting is designed to make it seem like China is destroying western car makers, when the reality is quite the opposite, most of them are able to move forward thanks to their Chinese links, but obviously most of them are dragged by their stupid constraints, overpaid executives, bloated portfolios, inefficient logistics, chronic lack of innovation and a long ass etcetera

I think that argument is hugely overblown. The lithium in batteries can be recovered to 90-95% through new recycling practices. Lithium is abundant in solid form in the ground and in liquid form from wells in California, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The oil companies are clinging to disinformation while the walls crumble around them. GM and Ford will lose their global markets and be left with only the USA. The rest of the world zooms past us. Pure electric vehicles are far more efficient and have about 70% fewer moving parts, meaning low maintenance.

There is another part of this discussion that makes the whole “Chinese auto industry vs American auto industry” framing much less clean than it sounds.
Tesla itself is a good example.
Tesla is American, but its battery supply chain has never been purely American. Panasonic was crucial to Tesla’s early scale, and Tesla later diversified its battery sourcing to companies including LG Energy Solution and CATL. So even the most successful American pure-EV manufacturer was built around a global, heavily Asian battery supply chain.
Brazil makes this even more interesting because we are watching several versions of this industrial integration happen at the same time.
BYD took over Ford’s former industrial complex in Camaçari and is progressively localizing production. GWM took over Mercedes-Benz’s former factory in Iracemápolis. Renault and Geely are expanding their industrial relationship in Brazil.
GM itself is now assembling Chinese-developed Chevrolet EVs in Ceará. The Spark EUV and Captiva EV come from GM’s Chinese industrial ecosystem with SAIC and Wuling and are being assembled locally. Toyota and BYD have a 50/50 EV R&D joint venture. Nissan has had a major industrial relationship with Dongfeng in China for decades.
At some point, asking whether a technology is simply “Chinese” or “Western” stops having an easy answer.
And Brazil gives us another interesting experiment: range.
If you look only at Brazilian homologation figures, some EVs can look surprisingly short-legged. Cars with batteries in the 50-60 kWh range can receive official Inmetro/PBEV range figures around 300 km.
But the Brazilian number is deliberately conservative. Inmetro does not simply publish the raw laboratory result. Adjustment factors are applied to produce a more conservative real-world reference.
The problem is that a lot of automotive discussion here then treats that number almost as the maximum distance the EV can realistically travel.
Owner experience often looks very different.
We now have EV owners driving these cars across Brazil, including mountainous areas and routes that climb from the coast onto the plateau. There are owners and independent tests substantially exceeding the official Inmetro range, and under favorable conditions some results get much closer to WLTP. Larger-battery EVs can exceed 400 km in real use even when their Brazilian homologated number looks much less impressive.
Obviously that does not mean WLTP is guaranteed real-world range. Drive at 120 km/h, climb continuously, add headwind, temperature changes or heavy HVAC use and consumption changes dramatically.
But this exposes an interesting asymmetry in how cars are discussed here.
When a small 1.0-liter ICE car achieves an exceptionally good km/l result, automotive enthusiasts and media are perfectly happy to show what the car can achieve under favorable real-world conditions.
With EVs, I often see the opposite. The conservative Inmetro figure gets repeated as the defining range of the vehicle, while owner consumption and independent road results receive much less attention.
A much better way to discuss EV range is to show the homologation numbers and then show actual energy consumption.
If an EV does 12, 15, 18 or 22 kWh/100 km, anyone can understand what a 40, 60 or 90 kWh battery means under different conditions. That's much more informative than saying “this is a 300 km car” because one homologation system printed 300 km on the label.
And all of this comes back to the original Detroit question.
Brazil is becoming a useful real-world laboratory because Chinese manufacturers are no longer simply shipping Chinese-built cars here. They are buying former Western factories, hiring Brazilian workers and progressively localizing production. At the same time, established American, European and Japanese manufacturers are increasingly using Chinese partners, platforms, batteries, engineering or complete vehicles.
Europe is moving in a similar direction as Chinese manufacturers localize more production there.
That gives us an opportunity to separate two things that are constantly mixed together in this discussion.
If Chinese manufacturers lose most of their price advantage when they manufacture in Brazil, Europe or eventually the US with local workers, then Chinese wages, subsidies and domestic production conditions were clearly doing much of the work.
But if a substantial advantage survives localization, then wages cannot be the entire explanation. Battery costs, vertical integration, EV-specific platforms, supplier organization, procurement, manufacturing scale, automation, development cycles and margins all have to enter the discussion.
That's why I would actually find an American-built Chinese EV much more interesting than another imported Chinese EV.
Require American production. American wages. American safety and environmental standards. Apply the same rules to everyone.
Then compare the products.
If an American-built BYD ends up costing roughly the same as an equivalent American-built GM or Ford, we learn something important about where the original Chinese cost advantage came from.
But if it can still compete aggressively on price, equipment and efficiency while paying American production costs, then tariffs didn't answer the underlying competitiveness question.
They only delayed the experiment.

If BYD comes in, it will really erode GM and Ford. Ford already is struggling pretty badly. GM is just treading water.
Any deal to bring Chinese cars into the US would need to require they are built/assembled in the US. Otherwise they'll absolutely destroy the competition. It's extremely dangerous to basically let China do all of the world's manufacturing

One thing I think this thread is showing is that the question is becoming bigger than simply "Chinese cars are cheap because Chinese workers are cheap."
Wages and subsidies matter. But Chinese manufacturers are increasingly moving production outside China, which gives us a chance to test that explanation in the real world.
Brazil is a particularly interesting example.
For decades, the market was dominated by established American, European, Japanese and Korean manufacturers with local factories, suppliers, dealerships and huge brand recognition. Chevrolet was enormously strong, and the Onix spent years as the country's best-selling car.
Now the structure is changing.
BYD took over Ford's former industrial complex in Camaçari and is progressively localizing production. GWM took over Mercedes-Benz's former factory in Iracemápolis. Renault and Geely are expanding their industrial partnership and investing together in Brazil.
And it gets stranger than simply "Chinese companies versus legacy automakers."
GM itself is assembling Chinese-developed Chevrolet EVs in Brazil. The Spark EUV and Captiva EV are being assembled in Ceará using products originating from GM's Chinese ecosystem with SAIC and Wuling.
Toyota has a 50/50 EV R&D joint venture with BYD. Nissan has a long industrial relationship with Dongfeng in China. Renault is partnering with Geely.
So the borders between "Chinese" and "traditional" manufacturers are becoming increasingly blurry.
Europe may become an even better test. Chinese manufacturers are actively looking for existing European factories rather than simply exporting everything from China. BYD says that, longer term, it expects to need three vehicle assembly plants and a battery plant in Europe.
That is why I don't think the wage argument settles this.
If BYD builds cars with Brazilian or European workers and most of its price advantage disappears, then labor costs, subsidies and producing in China were obviously doing a huge amount of the work.
But if a substantial advantage remains, we have to ask what else explains it: battery costs, vertical integration, platform design, automation, supplier organization, scale, development cycles, margins, or some combination of them.
And this is where I come back to Detroit.
The US doesn't have to allow unlimited Chinese imports to test this.
Require local production. Require American wages. Require US safety and environmental standards. Apply trade safeguards.
Then let the products compete.
Protection can give an industry time to adjust. But the important question is what Detroit does with that time.
Because Chinese manufacturers aren't standing still outside the US. They're localizing production, buying or reusing factories, forming partnerships with established manufacturers and becoming part of the same global supply chains that legacy automakers use.
Brazil is already experiencing that transition. Europe increasingly is too. Renault and Geely, for example, just announced another €319 million investment in their Brazilian partnership.
If an American-built Chinese EV eventually costs roughly the same as an American-built competitor, we'll have learned something important about the original Chinese cost advantage.
But if it can still compete aggressively on price and equipment while paying American production costs, then keeping the imported version out didn't solve Detroit's underlying competitiveness problem.
It just postponed the test.

Why would they diverge? That’s a false argument. They would fire the CEO for being an idiot. GM in other geographies mostly just makes the same vehicles unless they partner. Most of the partnerships are just to piggyback off the partner’s supply chain.

The reason you will NOT see GM be competitive with the Chinese brands in the short term is cost of manufacturing. The moment automatition with stuff like Optimus happens the advantage to having cars produced in China vanishes. But China knows this also which is why they are also building plants overseas anticpating this in other countries. Frankly the bigger question for countries is whether or not they decide to put up protectionist barriers to try and force local manufacturing once automatition makes production outside of China viable.
What I am more curious is if some of the larger economies like Brazel, Nigeria etc will start to have its own domestic car manufactureres come to the forfront due to automation rather then foreign car manufacturers whether they are from the US, Japan, China or Korea.

|GM 2025 Metric|Amount|
|:-|:-|
|Free Cash Flow|\~$17.6B|
|Pension payments |\~$4–6B|
|Dividends + Buybacks|\~$7.7B|
It's always the pensions fault, but somehow they can afford tons of dividends & stock-buybacks....

The big 3 have a world of problems, some their cars, most are not. Ford for example can’t make an EV of Bibi held a gun to their head. GM is fine, FCA can’t make anything that isn’t a Ram 1500.

What are you talking about? We will love the GM Trabant and Ford Yugo. That totally worked out for East Germany and Yugoslavia, right?

GM seems to be trying but it’s painfully clear how bloated and kneecapped they are. They seem to be afraid to dump money into their new platforms as fast as they need to and everyone is afraid of making individual decisions without running it through 37 departments for approval and waiting 8 months for the most basic changes to start being implemented. If a Chinese auto manufacturer decides they need to build a new test facility, make a design improvement, change suppliers or demand different specs on components it’s done in matter of days to weeks.
The US corporate structure isn’t setup to make fast decisions. Even me as an individual or small business if I want to get a tool die made, I’m looking at 6 months minimum and $350k USD. If I go to get that same die made in China I can get it done for $15k and I can make daily or weekly revisions by sending new prints directly to the machine shop through WeChat. And if I don’t like the quality they’ll have a new one on the way immediately. In the US it would be a month of back and forth and possibly involve them firing me as a customer.

GM and other American car makers have received billions, they just don't call it subsidies 🤣🤣

That's actually the strongest counterargument to what I'm suggesting, and I think it's possible.
A protected and highly profitable US market could give GM the cash flow to compete much more aggressively elsewhere. GM could make money on trucks and SUVs at home while being forced to cut costs and develop cheaper electrified products in markets like Brazil.
My question is what happens if those two sides of GM start diverging too much.
If the protected US profits are being used to make GM more efficient globally, then protection may genuinely be buying useful time.
But if GM becomes increasingly dependent on high-margin trucks and SUVs in the US while its smaller and more affordable products struggle against Chinese competitors internationally, then the protected market may be masking the problem rather than fixing it.
Brazil is why I'm interested in this distinction. GM can't avoid BYD, GWM and Geely here. Chevrolet has to compete for the same private customers, and that is already forcing a different product and pricing environment.
So I agree that protection doesn't automatically make GM less competitive.
The question is whether Detroit is using the protected revenue stream to become capable of competing without protection later.
If it is, that's a successful industrial strategy.
If it isn't, then the US market becomes a very profitable shelter while the competitive problem keeps growing outside it.

You’re talking about GM competing with Chinese companies in international markets and then wondering if banning them from the US is making them less competitive?
I think protecting their home market secures their revenue streams while they compete and evolve.

There's another US-specific factor that I think matters here: the American auto market isn't just protected from Chinese competition. It's also unusually dependent on large pickups and SUVs, especially for Detroit's most profitable products.
The reaction to Ram dropping the Hemi V8 from the 1500 was a fascinating example. There was enough customer demand for the V8 that Ram eventually brought it back.
Brazil has some of that culture too, particularly among wealthier pickup buyers and in agribusiness. Brazilian V8 enthusiasts celebrated its return as well. But the scale is completely different.
In the US, the F-150, Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500 are mainstream vehicles, and above them you have the F-Series Super Duty, Silverado 2500/3500 and Ram 2500/3500.
That creates an interesting situation for Detroit. Chinese manufacturers have become extremely aggressive in compact cars, crossovers, batteries, BEVs and PHEVs, while American manufacturers still make enormous amounts of money in vehicle segments where US consumer preferences are quite different from most of the world.
That can be a strength. BYD can't simply take a successful Chinese compact EV and expect it to replace an F-150.
But it could also become a weakness if those highly profitable American segments allow Detroit to postpone becoming price-competitive in smaller vehicles and electrified powertrains that it needs to sell internationally.
That's why I keep coming back to GM. GM can make excellent money selling large trucks in the US while simultaneously being forced to learn how to compete with BYD, Geely and GWM in markets like Brazil.
Maybe that strategy works. But if the US business becomes increasingly dependent on expensive trucks and SUVs while other markets move toward cheaper electrified vehicles, that's a very different long-term risk from simply asking whether Americans want Chinese cars.