EU commission tweet in article:
The electric vehicles sector is crucial for the clean economy.
But markets are flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars with price artificially kept low by huge state subsidies.
There's no 'but' mf. That's the solution. If you need EV cars to lower emissions you need to source affordable EV cars (you could go down the transit route but that doesn't seem to be an option on the table).
Of course what you say here is absolutely correct, but i just want to add one caveat:
EVs don't completely solve the emissions problem by themselves, you also need a green grid as well, and while China is working on achieving just that, the Europeans - in particular the Germans - are going full speed ahead in the opposite direction, dismantling nuclear power, replacing it with coal, and choosing LNG shipped across an entire ocean by heavily polluting tankers instead of pipeline gas from Russia which is transported much cleaner.
I agree with that. It's easy to accept the framing that EVs are a solution but you're spot on that without a green energy source, they're not going to fix anything. Could even be worse if people start scrapping combustion engine vehicles early, thinking they're doing a good thing. Overall emissions could be similar but society has to build a whole new car and loses resources embodied in the wasted vehicle.
it's not a 'but' it's simply not saying the quiet part: maintaining leverage is more important than the climate (or anything else for that matter).
Are Chinese EV manufacturers even given that insane of a subsidy?
It's not like they're subsidizing exports on a per-unit basis. It's mostly just tax exemptions for EV sales to encourage domestic uptake of EVs.