Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva helped to inaugurate a new megafactory on the site of a former Ford car manufacturing plant one month before the UN climate summit.
The new plant, in Brazil’s Camacari, Bahia, is one of many being built around the world by China’s BYD, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric cars.
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BYD’s presence is also being felt at the ongoing COP30 climate summit in Brazil’s Belem, where it is a cosponsor alongside GWM, another Chinese electric carmaker.
The sponsorship at the UN’s top climate meeting, where China’s official delegation of 789 people is second only to Brazil’s 3, 805 people, is just one of many ways that China’s investments in green technology are being felt.
It contrasts sharply with the United States, where no official delegation has been sent by the federal government. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has accused US President Donald Trump of “handing the future to China” and leaving states like California to pick up the slack, in a speech at the summit.
“China is here,” he declared. United States of America is the only nation that is not present, Newsom claimed. Trump has called concerns over climate change a “hoax” and a “con job”.
However, the polarizing effects China and the US are having on addressing the climate crisis are being felt at the UN Climate Change Conference COP30.
Chinese electric vehicles have been much more expensive than their manufacturers’ prices due to trade barriers in the US and neighboring Canada.
These tariffs are a legacy of former US President Joe Biden’s administration, and place North America as an outlier at a time when Chinese EVs otherwise dominate the global market.
How much of the EV market is China?
Chinese EVs have “really upended the car market” in recent years, according to Joel Jaeger, a senior research associate with the World Resources Institute.
China has gone “from basically not a major player five years ago” to becoming “the number one exporter of cars globally in terms of the units”, says Jaeger.
China produced 12.4 million electric cars in 2024, or more than 70% of the 17.3 million electric cars produced globally last year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
About 1.4 million of these cars were exported by China, accounting for 40% of global exports, while the majority of the remaining Chinese-made vehicles were domestically sold.
This dominance has been built on the back of “subsidies that China’s put in place to develop its industry, which I think is a very strategic thing that China has done, both for its own economic growth as well as decarbonisation”, Jaeger said.
Chinese electric vehicles are still comparatively uncommon on American or Canadian streets.
Why are Chinese electric vehicles less affordable in the US and Canada?
According to Jaeger, “prohibitive” tariffs mean that Chinese EVs are almost impossible to buy in the US and Canada.
He continued, “Over the past year, the US and Canada both implemented essentially total prohibitive tariffs on EVs over 100% in both places.”
Notably, Trump has vowed to fight it and “drill, baby, drill” for oil while Democrats’ Biden, a Democrat, who has advocated renewable energy, introduced the steep import taxes on Chinese EVs in the US.
A month after the US introduced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs in September 2024, Canada brought in identical tariffs of its own.
This implies that a vehicle that a Chinese EV manufacturer might be selling for $30, 000 in the US or Canada actually costs at least $60,000. Even the less expensive Chinese models can’t compete with the more expensive US electric models, which typically cost about $55,000.
These tariffs, along with other US policies, have meant that Chinese manufacturers have yet to set up shop in the US.
According to Addisu Lashitew, an associate professor of business at McMaster University in Canada, the steep tariffs conflict with targets for fully electric cars by 2035, and are also complicated because of Canada’s close trading ties to the US.
The issue is that we are currently having a very complicated trade conversation with the US, Lashitew said. “And two, our supply chain has also]been] very much integrated. Here are primarily Canadian companies’ suppliers, while many American companies are present.
However, Jaeger contends that North America is missing out on importing new Chinese technology even though it is nearly impossible to purchase one of these cars in the US.
“The US, for example, imports a lot of batteries from China. In fact, China imports lithium-ion batteries from China second only to Germany in the world. They are being used in US-made electric vehicles, he said.
Where can I find affordable Chinese electric vehicles?
Many other nations have been more welcoming of China’s EV market, according to Jaeger, than the US and Canada.
“You see different reactions from different countries, depending on their relationship with China, but mostly depending upon their domestic auto manufacturing presence”, he said.
According to Lashitew, Chinese exporters, including BYD and some smaller ones, are “targeting many emerging and developing nations.”
“Ironically, we’re in a situation where, at least in the transportation sector, the energy transition is moving much more quickly than it has in North America.
Chinese electric cars have also continued to sell well in many European countries, says Jaeger, despite those countries also imposing some tariffs, though lower than the US and Canada, “for what they see as unfair competitive practices in China”.
Despite having factories in Brazil, Hungary, India, and Japan, BYD still maintains its strongest presence in China, where it was founded in Shenzhen in 1995. Chinese consumers made up the majority of the 4.27 million electric vehicles BYD sold in 2024. BYD also has a manufacturing presence in Lancaster, California, where it builds electric buses and batteries, but not cars.
The government’s incentives for local businesses in China have increased, in part because they saw electric cars as a part of their plan to reduce air pollution in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
The government’s strategy has had positive effects on Chinese customers, including with new technology. For example, a new battery, which BYD announced in March with the promise of charging for 400km (about 250 miles) of travel in just five minutes, is first being made available for preorder to customers in China only.
How much do electric vehicles cost?
They cost more than gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles in the past. But according to the IEA, the cost of owning an electric car over the vehicle’s entire lifetime is now less than fossil fuel-powered cars, due to the reduced costs of fuel and maintenance.
However, buying an electric vehicle is still frequently more expensive.
China’s manufacturer subsidies are helpful in that area. The IEA has found that prices for electric cars in China are similar to petrol and diesel cars, with half of all electric cars being sold for less than $30, 000 and a wide range of lower-priced models available.
In contrast, the IEA claims that “the range]of available EVs] was skewed towards higher-end models with higher prices” in the US and Europe.
Under Biden, the US attempted to boost its domestic electric vehicle industry while reducing China’s dependence on the latter.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) introduced incentives for US manufacturers that did not use any Chinese parts. Despite being largely overturned by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which became law in July, the IRA also introduced subsidies for customers who purchased EVs.
However, despite the incentives imposed by Biden, only one in ten cars sold in the US in 2024 was electric, compared to more than half of all new cars sold in China in the same year.
not just automobiles
In many places around the world, people are increasingly turning to electric bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, buses, and even trains, despite the headlines for sustainable transportation.
Even in the US, says Jaeger, there has been a significant growth in the number of electric scooters and two-wheelers imported from China.
In the 12 months leading up to September 2025, the US imported $ 1.5 billion worth of electric two-wheelers from China, an increase of $ 275 million, or more than 20%, from the previous year, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC). According to experts, this is because scooters are less expensive than cars and because US taxes on Chinese electric scooters are also lower than those on electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the government has said it will ban petrol-powered motorbikes in the centre of its capital, Hanoi, from July next year, as part of a plan to tackle local air pollution.
In Europe, including Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway, the IEA estimates that about 40% of bus sales are now electric.
In Central and South America, electric bus sales have increased as well. In Mexico, for example, “close to 18 percent of all bus sales were electric in 2024, up from just above 1 percent in 2023”, according to the IEA.
The US is still struggling in this area, too. The leading electric bus manufacturer went bankrupt, and a second company stopped making electric buses in the US market after suffering significant financial losses, according to the IEA, in 2024.
Source: Aljazeera
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