I'm an American. I've never been to China or seen one of these Chinese electric cars in person but everything suggests they're on their way to a formidable auto industry in the electric and city-car/light use space - the demographic that Honda and Toyota captured in the 70s and 80s.
Of course if you've done any traveling you'd find many countries have a national auto-manufacturer that's deeply popular in country without much penetration outside (take Vinfast or Saipa for instance) and the Chinese auto companies have yet to prove they can stake a foothold outside of their home country at the Kia or Mercedes level but they just started.
BYD just entered Japan under 2 months ago and XPeng entered Europe only about 6 months ago.
Time will tell, but we could be seeing the very early stage of Chinese auto brands becoming household names.
History will treat these sites as the he modern equivalent of the hitler youth. For instance the recent US invasion and occupation of parts of Syria seems to be completely missing from peoples memories. Were Americans simply not informed in the first place? We got millions of Syrian refugees into the EU.
Essentially the US pretends like it's the only country. It's softened in the past 20 years with the rise of the internet but the bubble used to be extremely strong when I was younger.
Could simple nationalism (or something else) not be the motivator?
As it looks now (in Europe); the stigma associated with China is very strong and the brands that succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China.
GM is involved with Wuling for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling but I think we call this Chinese, right? Transnational industrial capitalism is weird like that.
Not if they increase tariffs beyond the measly 10%. Which they should.
