That ignores the rest of the world though. Trump can’t prevent China from selling to Africa, South America, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, … many of those countries (Aus) don’t even have domestic auto producers to worry about. Yes, the USA, South Korea, Japan, and Western Europe can protect their own markets, but the world is huge and China can easily dominate EVs everywhere else.
What EV markets outside the US/EU? Australia and maybe Thailand? Otherwise, it's difficult to find infrastructure that supports EVs elsewhere.
BYD is already in Japan, but it's quite limited. China has shadow-banned Korean automaker Hyundai/Kia since 2017 (THAAD) and battery makers LG, Samsung, SK since 2016 -- not sure if China would be warmly received there.
south americans, the african continent, just to name a few.
> it's difficult to find infrastructure to support EVs.
sure, but it doesn't mean it won't get built. What if china goes all in, and do the belt-and-road initiative v2, and build out those countries' infrastructure (and conveniently eliminate the soft power that the US would have there, such as financial power)?
China has no real "defense" against financial power of the US (vis a vi sanctions), but they're surely doing something about it. And given the CCP's long term planning (for which they can, since they're authoritarian and don't need to cater for an election every few years), they can press for policies that play out long term.
There is a huge market outside of the US/EU. Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia, etc…all they need is to provide a better value and they’ll own the market, nothing the US can do about it.
EV infra and is a lot easier to realize than importing/refining oil. Electricity can be generated in a variety of ways and, oh, hey, China is exporting that also.
I don’t know. There are plenty of places where you don’t have gasoline to fill up a plastic bottle (which is how they do it in most of the developing world), but a water wheel generating electricity from glacier run off.
