With the average cost of a new vehicle in the United States nearing $50,000, it’s understandable some Americans are dreaming of a cheaper Chinese alternative.
The allure of paying half the price of a reputable American, Korean or Japanese vehicle has sparked a new push to persuade the federal government to relax the rules and make America a Chinese-car-buying market like Mexico and Europe.
Popular YouTube reviewer Marques Brownlee recently assessed the Xiaomi SU7 Max, praising the electric vehicle’s quality and outstanding price point.
“This feels nothing like a $42,000 car,” Brownlee said. “This is a $42,000 car that feels like a $75,000 car if it were made here in the US.”
“There’s basically no question in my mind that if a car like this were available in the US for $42,000 that it would crush, of course,” he concluded.
But chasing the cheapest goods China provides the West has blinded us to the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term nefarious trap of market domination by manipulation.
And China isn’t just interested in taking over the automotive market — it wants to lead the world in metadata collection, including vehicle metadata.
With a technology background and a strong interest in vehicles my entire adult life, I’m extremely concerned about the direction of the automobile industry.
Cars are being commissioned to collect obscene amounts of information on American drivers, and now the modern car has scraped human inputs for a computerized driving experience.
You may not realize this, but your typical new car is a supercomputer on wheels constantly connected to the internet, prepared to give you real-time traffic information and update your vehicle’s computer systems like your Windows PC.
Everything you do in your vehicle is capable of being recorded as metadata that can either be stored temporarily or transmitted to a third party without you ever knowing.
Beyond data collection, your vehicle can be controlled remotely, disabling special features and basic functionalities.
OnStar, a service offered on General Motors vehicles, can disable a vehicle if stolen, lock or unlock your car doors and perform other functions remotely, for example.
Decades ago, your brake system had a mechanical connection to your brake pedal, as with your accelerator pedal, physically pulling a wire connected to the throttle body to allow air to enter your engine.
But today your pedals are designed to send electrical signals to the computer to indicate you want to brake or accelerate.
Technology has literally severed the connection of control that drivers had to their cars by outsourcing all operations to highly sophisticated onboard computers.
While some technologists proclaim this evolution has several upsides, the downsides are massive and potentially deadly in the wrong hands.
The bad news about computers is that every computer can be hacked — it’s just a matter of time and ambition to make it happen.
With the right ingenuity, time and financial backing, state actors could target an individual to disable his brakes or put his accelerator to 100% throttle.
If you’re driving an electric vehicle, they could manipulate the battery to operate at exceedingly high temperatures to create a battery fire while keeping your doors permanently locked — from thousands of miles away.
The ambition to do such things only increases with the ease of access to said vehicle’s computer, and this is the dangerous environment Chinese vehicles around the world are creating.
“The level of monitoring and detail that Chinese-made cars and components give to the CCP would stagger most people,” declared Christopher Balding, founder of New Kite Data Labs and a leading expert on China’s surveillance state and economic practices.
He echoed my technological concerns with allowing an authoritarian state like China to have access to vehicle data or remote control with Chinese auto manufacturers operating as state proxies.
“If I know that you are a diplomat who is driving a Chinese vehicle, and I know that you’re currently driving on the highway because I can tell that you’re maintaining 65 to 75 miles an hour — well, I have the capability of turning off your brakes because your brakes are electronic,” Balding said in a phone interview.
“In an EV car there’s probably around 2,000 chips. People don’t understand just how many entry points that is, especially if a lot of those chips are coming from China. So it’s not simply Chinese cars we’re talking about. Because if a car has a hotspot, you can be guaranteed it’s going to have a microphone. So there’re all kinds of ways these types of things can be exploited.”
The knee-jerk reaction to these technological realities implies China doesn’t have the motivation to bring this to fruition.
The truth is the CCP is already doing this in the People’s Republic of China with automakers, whether they’re Chinese or foreign automakers like Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW.
The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security acknowledged in 2024 that hundreds of automakers comply with the CCP’s demands.
“Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for vehicles in the PRC, due to the vast amounts of data generated by their products, are notable targets for government access. According to open-source reporting, over 200 automakers that operate in the PRC are legally obligated to transmit real-time vehicle data, including geolocation information, to government monitoring centers,” it stated.
“This pervasive data sharing, which provides the PRC government with detailed information on the behaviors and habits of individuals, is indicative of a broader approach to co-opting private companies.”
It’s referring to China’s Ministry of Industry and Technology mandate that a vehicle send at least 61 data points (including geolocation, battery status and other telemetry) to the manufacturer, who will then forward it to government monitoring platforms.
But beyond this regulation, the 2017 National Intelligence Law compels Chinese companies to share data with the government for anything it deems a national-security concern, making every Chinese company an unwanted CCP proxy, foreign and abroad.
This massive security vulnerability is only starting to be recognized in the United Kingdom and other European nations like Denmark and Norway after discovering their Chinese buses were indeed in constant communication with China and presented potential backdoors for remote operations.
Project Lion Cage, an independent research project mostly based in Norway, examined the risks of hacking and spying on Chinese-made EVs like the NIO ES8 SUV and Yutong buses, which operate in Oslo’s public-transportation system.
After months of examining these autos’ communication, it discovered 90% of the vehicles sent internet requests with data back to China, and the data weren’t always encrypted, allowing for easy interception.
With such low security, their team of white-hat hackers were able to get into the Chinese vehicles’ computers in only four days.
The United Kingdom recently announced the Department for Transport and the National Cyber Security Centre are analyzing whether Yutong buses operating within its borders are equally vulnerable.
There is massive concern about the CCP’s potential operational power, not just for random espionage but as a leverage point for international control.
Imagine China engaging in an international conflict, and the CCP has the keys to shut down a critical part of your transportation system.
What if it threatens to disable the technological backdoors into various Chinese devices throughout the West if we attempt to stop it from invading Taiwan?
This is a regime petty enough to cut off the NBA because a general manager, Daryl Morey, showed support for Hong Kong protesters via Twitter.
Of course these scenarios of cyberwarfare are plausible when the stakes are higher than a tweet.
The West makes the mistake of believing this Communist nation engages in capitalism because it’s selling you a product.
It’s not — it’s engaging in market manipulation by subsidizing select markets because its incentive structures differ from ours.
An American corporation will sell a product because profits are essential to its existence, whereas the CCP will directly fund manufacturers to create products of need, making profits arbitrary and allowing them to undercut foreign competitors until they dominate the market.
Intellectual-property theft is an essential aspect of Chinese market growth, with China outpacing every other nation stealing from American corporations and institutions.
The Department of Justice acknowledges that 80% of all economic-espionage prosecutions brought to them allege conduct that would benefit the Chinese state.
The CCP’s modus operandi has always been to lie, cheat and steal its way to the top.
Elaine Dezenski, head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, watches the CCP’s goals and growth in the automotive industry.
“Chinese companies’ rapid rise and spread throughout global markets is not a story of competitive success but of non-market manipulations. China’s automotive lead rests on the back of a state-led system that subsidizes overproduction, manipulates inputs and prices and treats foreign markets as a pressure release valve for its own structural weaknesses,” she said by phone.
“The Chinese Communist Party is willing to basically subsidize this massive production to gain a foothold and then watch as the Western manufacturers go out of business because we cannot compete on a level playing field with that.
“Nothing seems to be off the table here with the Chinese. Their use of forced labor is particularly problematic,” she added.
“It’s beyond the issue of forced labor is bad, which it clearly is. It has been weaponized against us.”
Chinese EVs are essentially barred from the American market with extremely high tariffs (more than 100% on EVs and related components), but they don’t need to be in our borders to destroy the American car industry.
Dezenski emphasized all the major automakers sell cars globally, and if they are massively outpriced by subsidized Chinese automakers in places like Mexico, that could be enough to disrupt the profitability of American companies like General Motors and potentially lead to their downfall.
“Mexico has now become the largest import market for Chinese vehicles. So this presents a number of concerns. The bigger problem is that if there’s so many Chinese imports and they’re so far below market prices, Mexicans are going to buy those cars. And that then erodes the manufacturing capacity of Mexico, both to serve North America but mostly to serve itself,” she lamented.
Chinese vehicles are not only a security risk on a variety of levels — they’re an economic risk for the American worker and corporation.
Fortunately, there’s bipartisan support for keeping Chinese passenger vehicles out of the US market with raised tariffs.
But if car prices don’t come down to more reasonably affordable levels, the demand to lower tariffs may become a political one that weak and naïve politicians will embrace.
If this enters the political world in association with President Trump and his tariffs, future Democratic presidential nominees might seize this moment to promise the public to lower tariffs for short-term buyer relief while spiting their greatest Republican adversary.
But cheap car prices are never worth our sovereignty, safety and national security.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “The Children We Left Behind” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
