It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.

It’s highly impractical to import cars less than 25 years old into the US for anything beyond “show & display” licensing, and that’s only for select models.

Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.

What are the requirements of vehicles that drive across the border, like if a Canadian family is holidaying in Buffalo?

If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?

What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.

Biden’s banning them was not a good decision IMO.

At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.

However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.

now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.

Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.

> because they know there will never be competition

In the US only.

It seems to be the same small vision that lead to French cars being sold in droves in Latin America.

I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.