In August 2026, a single piece of news made America's love-hate relationship with Chinese EVs concrete: it was reported that Waymo, the largest robotaxi operator in the United States, had imported more than 3,200 Chinese-made electric vehicles through the Port of Los Angeles since 2024 — over 2,600 of them in 2026 alone. From May onwards, Waymo has been deploying in Los Angeles and San Francisco the small electric van Ojai, a custom variant of the Zeekr CM1e built by Zeekr. Outsiders initially expected Waymo to put no more than 1,000 vehicles into service; the import data shows its ambitions go considerably further.
This is not a procurement story — it is an industry vote. While the U.S. government uses tariffs and bans to keep Chinese EVs out at the gate, America's most advanced autonomous-driving company is going around the high wall and buying Chinese vehicles in bulk. The reason is not, primarily, that they are cheap — although even with tariffs stacked on, the Ojai's cost may still be less than half that of Waymo's current Jaguar I-Pace — but that the United States can no longer produce the underlying platform that the next generation of mobility will be built on.
The Way Around the Wall
Waymo's imports are not smuggling through a loophole — they are a carefully engineered compliance structure. In 2021, Waymo partnered with Geely: Zeekr handles the vehicle platform, battery, electric drive, chassis, and complete vehicle manufacturing; Waymo provides the autonomous-driving system, the lidar, the cameras, and the entire Waymo Driver software stack. The vehicles are built in China and shipped to the United States, where Waymo's plant in Arizona integrates the autonomous-driving system.
The U.S. Department of Commerce's "Connected Vehicles Final Rule" prohibits, from 2027 onward, the import or sale of complete vehicles that integrate Chinese-developed infotainment or autonomous-driving software, and of vehicles sold under brands controlled by Chinese capital; from 2029, the import of independent Chinese-made components is banned; from 2030, even complete vehicles carrying these hardware components may not be sold. Waymo's imports happen to slip just below this timeline. Zeekr supplies only the body, chassis, battery, and electric drive — the traditional automotive parts — while every piece of connected-vehicle and compute hardware is designed and installed by Waymo itself after the vehicle arrives on U.S. soil.
Compliant — but going around the wall. The real question is: why is Waymo going to all this trouble?
Not Being Able to Buy Hurts More Than Not Being Able to Afford
If a domestic American supplier of comparable capability existed, Waymo would not need to take this detour. The fact is that, in the manufacturing side of new-energy vehicles, the United States has lost the ability to provide the underlying platform for the next generation of mobility. What Waymo needs is not a company that can build a car, but a new-energy supply chain able to respond quickly to custom requirements: vertically integrated battery, electric drive, electronic controls, and thermal management; the platform-derivation ecosystem of the SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) platform; and an iteration cadence of one new model every 12 to 18 months. The electric models from BMW, Chevrolet, Hyundai, and Kia cannot deliver something that works out of the box, with preconfigured software and pre-set hardware anchor points.
"What Waymo is importing is not a 'Chinese smart car' in the full sense, but a mature pure-electric platform. Zeekr builds the car; Waymo installs the 'brain' and the 'nervous system.' This supply chain can only be provided by China."
The Costs of Protectionism
The U.S. government's design logic is: Chinese cars are too strong → close the market → domestic carmakers buy time → they grow stronger. The real laws of industry say something different: competitiveness can only grow through competition, not in a greenhouse. Tariffs raise the sticker price of Chinese cars and make domestic EVs look "competitive" on price — but what they protect is never competitiveness; it is the profit margins of lagging capacity.
The U.S. carmakers' own ledgers make the point. Ford's Model e EV unit lost $4.8 billion in 2025 alone, with cumulative losses exceeding $10 billion since its founding; F-150 Lightning sales fell nearly 20% year on year, plunging more than 70% in November alone. Stellantis posted a net loss of €22.3 billion in 2025, with its CEO publicly conceding that the company "had overestimated the speed of its energy transition" and booking €22.2 billion in asset write-downs in one stroke. General Motors wrote down $7.6 billion on its EV business in the second half of last year. Combined write-downs and losses tied to the EV pivot at the three companies exceed $50 billion. Ford's global sales were also overtaken for the first time by BYD last year, slipping from sixth to seventh in the world.
Even more revealing is the composition of who is being protected. Washington is not protecting newcomers like Rivian and Lucid, but century-old giants like Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — and the core capabilities of battery chemistry, electric-drive efficiency, software-defined vehicles, and platform-based architecture are not in the organizational DNA of these legacy carmakers. What they need is not time; it is to be torn down and rebuilt. Yet capital, talent, and policy attention all flow toward a "too big to fail" old system. The policymakers' real calculation is to drag the "shock of Chinese cars entering America" past this term of office, past the next term of office, until it becomes someone else's problem — so "buying time" is, at the industrial level, an empty phrase. What it buys is political buffer, not technological breakthrough.
The Industry's Vote
Politicians build the wall; industry votes with its feet. Two years ago, Ford CEO Jim Farley said, "I've been driving a Xiaomi SU7 for six months and I don't want to give it back." At the time it was treated as one executive praising another. Looking back, he had already read the trend: within the next five to ten years, Chinese cars will inevitably enter the U.S. market. Inside Ford, a "Skunk Works"–style secret team was established — about 350 core members, led by a former Tesla executive, poached from Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Apple — with the mission of building a platform whose cost would match that of Chinese EVs. Stellantis, for its part, bought a 21% stake in Leapmotor in 2023 — not for contract manufacturing, but for Leapmotor's LEAP-series architecture and its cell-to-chassis (CTC) battery technology, with plans to apply Leapmotor's tech to the next generation of Opel models.
American consumers are voting too. The average transaction price of a new car in the United States has approached $50,000, while some entry-level Chinese new-energy vehicles cost less than $12,000. More than two-fifths of American consumers support Chinese car brands entering the U.S. market; nearly half consider Chinese cars good value for money — yet they cannot actually buy them because of the tariffs.
Europe's Mirror Experiment
Europe provides another data point. In 2025, China's new-energy passenger vehicles accounted for nearly 70% of global sales. Europe's EV penetration rate crossed 30%, while the U.S. remained below 10%. Despite the EU's higher tariffs on Chinese EVs, the EU's imports of cars from China surpassed one million units for the first time in 2025 — about 650,000 of them pure electric — and China accounted for over 55% of the EU's EV imports. Once Chinese brands entered Europe, they forced Volkswagen, BMW, and Stellantis to accelerate electrification, cut prices, and speed up iteration — competitive pressure became a catalyst for transformation. America's tariff barriers, by contrast, handed domestic carmakers a "get-out-of-jail-free card," and the result was not a fierce catch-up but an excuse for complacency.
This is not the first time the script has played out. In the 1980s, surging Japanese car exports to the United States led to the Voluntary Export Restraints (VER) being imposed on Japan. U.S. carmakers got a breather, but Detroit did not use the opportunity to reshape its competitiveness; instead, it gravitated toward raising prices and protecting margins. Japanese carmakers, meanwhile, moved upmarket into higher-margin luxury vehicles and accelerated building plants in the United States. By the mid-1990s, Japanese-brand output from U.S. plants already accounted for nearly 30% of the U.S. market — and the VER ended with the supposed "protected" side being outcompeted.
More than a century ago, the center of the auto industry shifted from Europe to the Americas; a few decades ago, it spread from the Americas to Asia. Today's reverse transmission cannot be blocked by a high wall. It is not that the wall is not high enough — it is that the logic of how competitiveness grows has never lived inside a walled enclosure.