The European Commission’s four-week countdown to impose additional tariffs as large as 38% on Chinese electric cars could ultimately do more harm than good to European car makers.
While the EU tariffs may protect European car makers in the short term from a price war with lower-cost Chinese cars in Europe, and in the medium to long term encourage more European production of Chinese electric cars that would be bring significant investment and jobs to the region, the threat of retaliatory tariffs in China would hurt profit margins and thus slow down investment in the EV development of Europe’s own.
Beijing has already made such threats.