China’s EV pirate ship is coming for Western carmakers – POLITICO
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China’s EV pirate ship is coming for Western carmakers
The U.S. is the one major auto market that has kept BYD out. But this will not end well unless the West unites.
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BYD electric vehicles leave a car carrier ship at the port of Bremerhaven in Germany on Feb. 26, 2024. | Focke Stramgmann/AFP via Getty Images
Opinion
July 16, 2026
4:00 am CET
By
Peter Navarro
Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
WASHINGTON — The Chinese auto company BYD is plundering global car markets. In response, Europe is dithering, Canada is opening America’s northern gate, and Mexico is becoming the southern staging ground for China’s assault on the U.S. auto market.
This is how industrial wars are lost: not by surrender but by letting the predator encircle markets while its would-be victims temporize.
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BYD is a microcosm of China’s pirate business model: copy, absorb, subsidize, scale, dump and dominate. It began life in 1995 as a battery maker. Today, it has blown past Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, selling 4.6 million in 2025, including about 2.26 million pure battery-electric cars. Tesla, by comparison, delivered about 1.6 million.
This wasn’t always the case. BYD’s early cars were notorious for being copies of Toyota and Honda designs. Its breakout F3 model was a Toyota Corolla clone with Honda characteristics. But BYD copied fast, modified just enough and scaled at Chinese factory speed.
Then came the supplier play. BYD placed orders for parts, then dropped suppliers as it reverse-engineered components and built them itself. Today, it boasts batteries, motors, electronics, power trains, semiconductors and components all under one roof. This is the dark side of its vertical integration: Suppliers thought they had customers, only to discover they had become unpaid tutors.
China then further developed its pirate model, offering foreign automakers access to its vast consumer market through joint ventures and the devil’s bargain of forced technology transfer. Through this, it extracted engineering methods, factory discipline, supplier networks, quality systems and research capacity.
The likes of Volkswagen, GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes and Toyota spent decades teaching China how to build world-class cars in exchange for market access. And BYD sat at the very center of this knowledge extraction: Daimler formed an EV joint venture with it. Toyota formed an EV research venture with it.
While Western CEOs thought they were selling cars, Beijing was buying time, know-how and dependency. Then BYD turned it all into a weapon.
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Today, Europe’s car market is buckling as BYD’s European sales are surging, and other Chinese carmakers Chery and Leapmotor are moving in the same direction. These are not normal market-share gains. They are breach points.
VW, once the king of China, is now being ingested by the very system it helped build. The company’s China earnings have fallen more than 80 percent over the past decade. It will cut 35,000 German jobs by 2030. It is also considering four factory closures in Germany and as many as 100,000 total job cuts worldwide — a restructuring once unthinkable.
Mercedes, BMW and Porsche are all facing the same pressure. The German premium model of engineering in-country, selling high-margin cars to China, then banking the profits is breaking. The apprentice has become the executioner.
A pedestrians’ traffic light is seen next to the headquarters of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany on July 9, 2026. | Tobias Schwartz/AFP via Getty Images
The EU thinks it is fighting back with a 17 percent countervailing duty on BYD. But that is not industrial defense. It is a cover charge.
The EU is not fighting BYD with the necessary force because it is not acting like a union. It is malfunctioning as a loose confederacy of vulnerable nations, each with its own China pressure points. In fact, when the EU voted on final countervailing duties on Chinese EVs, only 10 member countries backed the measure. Five voted no. Twelve abstained.
As the home of Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche, Germany should have been a supporter. But Germany sells China far more than just cars: machinery, chemicals, electrical equipment, precision tools and industrial components. So, Berlin voted against the tariffs because Beijing could retaliate across its whole export-dependent economy.
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Other capitals had their own reasons to flinch. Spain and France want Chinese EV plants. Hungary has become a landing zone for Chinese battery and EV investment. Poland and the Czech Republic want to protect their auto jobs but remain tied to German supply chains.
Then there is Beijing’s...