Is it so hard to acknowledge that China is better at manufacturing?

Doesn't Europe allow Chinese vehicles in their market? At least they admit it.

Both reasons can be correct

It’s not hard to be “better” when your competitor is wearing a strait jacket.

We have no idea if they are better at it, the last time there was a level playing field they weren’t a developed country.

The existence of environmental protection is fine, the existence of CAFE fscked up perverse incentives is a problem.

Having some labor quality of life concerns, making sure we aren't being undercut as a national security issue is fine. Having the chicken tax, destroying investments in solar energy and electric grids and EV charging is not.

We have bad manufacturing incentives in this country, our government wants the US to fail at solar, and the Chinese are playing to win.

If you have environmental protection and they don’t, your manufacturing is going to be more complicated than theirs, and therefore more expensive. It’s that simple.

We can also pressure them to enact equivalent environmental protections and refuse to trade otherwise, which would be great for the planet. Checking compliance would be difficult though, lying is culturally treated differently in different places.

German car manufacturers, famous for never lying in environmental audits.

Yes and I believe others in their own society penalized them for that, yes? Because it violates the local moral norms by placing greed over honesty. Would that happen in China? Like their approach works fine for them, it seems like at some point culturally they just gave up on trying to get people to be honest and just routed around that. Similar to how they routed around trying to get people to be humble with face culture. Making observations about a culture has to be allowable, because cultures are actually different. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve been isolated from each other for a long time, from a purely memetic evolution perspective we would expect them to be different. And Chinese culture has been around a lot longer so I’m open to the idea that their approach could be more effective. But if you make policy expecting them to be honest, your policy will fail. You just need to make policy against game theory without making moral assumptions.

It's the safety regulations and tariffs that have been keeping them out so far. And it might be tough to sell them in enough volume to make it worthwhile for a US market redesign. While a lot of people ask for cheap subcompacts in the US, they have traditionally struggled to sell.