On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, American car influencers have spent the last year reviewing electric vehicles their audiences cannot legally import. The cars are stopping viewers cold. Chinese automakers, many of which started in completely different industries, can now design, develop, and put a new EV into production in 18 months. Western carmakers typically need three to five years for the same cycle. The average new car price in the United States sits around $50,000. Multiple capable Chinese EVs are priced well under $40,000 in their home market, and several are under $20,000. Late in 2024, YouTuber Marques Brownlee reviewed the Xiaomi SU7 and the video crossed 10 million views. Bloomberg looks at what is driving the appetite and why the distance between the two markets may not hold.
The barriers keeping Chinese cars out of US showrooms are real. In 2024, under President Biden, the United States introduced a 100% tariff on Chinese EV imports. A rule introduced in early 2025 effectively banned vehicles containing Chinese-linked technology from sale in the country. Those policies have kept Chinese cars physically absent from dealerships. What they have not controlled is what people see online. Bloomberg reports that on platforms like TikTok, the dominant narrative around Chinese EVs is not one of unfair trade practice but one of American consumers being kept from buying something that is genuinely good. Chinese brands have major market share in Mexico, Brazil, Southeast Asia, and Europe, and those shares are growing in each region.
Industry analysts who dismantle Chinese EVs for competitive benchmarking say the pattern is consistent: Chinese manufacturers take existing innovations, improve on them, and move faster than anyone. The question for the US automotive industry, per Bloomberg, is whether there will be more openness to licensing Chinese technology, something several European automakers have already pursued. US companies have been far more cautious. The deeper problem may be a feedback loop: American manufacturers are constrained by what American consumers currently want to buy, American consumers are slower to adopt EVs, so investment doesn’t flow, and the technology gap widens each model cycle. Bloomberg frames the future of the US auto industry as hinging specifically on how that loop resolves.
Bottom line: The tariff wall keeps the cars out of dealerships. It cannot keep out the expectation of value that builds in viewers watching those videos every month, and eventually that expectation lands in a showroom somewhere.