The Ford CEO spent half a year driving a Chinese car to work. Jim Farley ran a Xiaomi SU7, a roughly $30,000 electric sedan with about 345 miles of range, as his daily driver, then went public calling BYD the best in the business. That detail opens Two Bit da Vinci's look at how fast China's auto industry has pulled ahead, and the numbers behind it are blunt. China sold 34.4 million vehicles in 2025 against 16.7 million in the United States, and now accounts for 35.6% of the global car market. More than one in three cars sold anywhere on the planet is sold in China, and the country has turned that home base into the world's largest vehicle export operation.
The video frames this almost entirely as a US story, and the contrast that makes the American response look unusual is what other markets chose to do. The European Union also moved to protect its automakers, adopting additional duties on China-built EVs in late 2024. Those tariffs topped out in the mid-40s percent for the least cooperative brands and ran lower for others, rather than a flat 100%. The gap matters. Chinese brands still grew their European share to around 6% in 2025 even with duties in place, because the cars stayed price-competitive after the tariff. A US wall set at 100% is high enough to keep the cars out entirely, which means American buyers never see the products, while European buyers weigh them against local models on the same showroom floor.
The export side has moved just as fast. The video reports China shipped 8.3 million vehicles in 2025, a 30% jump that made it the largest vehicle exporter for a third straight year, and Chinese brands are now building plants in Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, and Thailand to sidestep tariffs the way Japanese makers did in the 1980s. The American picture runs the other way. The $7,500 federal EV tax credit expired on September 30, 2025, and at least 20 EV models have been paused or dropped from the US market into early 2026. The Volvo EX30 is the clearest case. It was built first in China, then moved to Belgium to dodge one tariff, only to get hit by another, pushing a car meant to start under $35,000 to $40,345. Volvo says it will not sell it in the US after the 2026 model year.
Inside the video, the collapse of foreign brands within China is the most striking data. Chevrolet sold over 640,000 cars there in 2018 and around 52,000 by 2024, a 92% drop. Honda posted its first annual loss since 1977 with China sales down 31% in a single year. The cost picture explains the rout. BYD makes its own batteries, chips, and motors, runs an R&D staff of roughly 110,000 engineers, and files dozens of patents a day. CATL supplies about 39% of every EV battery sold worldwide, including the packs in Berlin-built Tesla Model Ys. The five best-selling Chinese-made EVs of 2025 averaged under $10,000, against an average new-car price of $51,456 in the US. China lists 130 EV models priced under $40,000. The United States offers four.
Bottom line: Tariffs are buying time, not closing a gap, and the video is right to say so plainly. The engineering lead China built came from scale, vertical integration, and a brutal domestic price war, none of which a 100% duty reverses. The honest question for anyone buying a car in America is not whether these vehicles are good. The Ford CEO already answered that. It is whether US automakers use the protected window to genuinely compete, or just wait it out until the wall stops working.