- There have been only a few EVs priced at $35,000 and under, and the cheapest—the Chevy Bolt EV—is going out of production after this year.
- The 2025 Volvo EX30, built in China, starts at $36,145, even after the tariff levied on China-built cars imported to the U.S.
- It’s possible this Volvo crossover represents the start of a Chinese EV juggernaut in the U.S. market.
Last week’s unveiling of the 2025 Volvo EX30 may be viewed as a watershed moment in U.S. auto sales. The 268-hp rear-drive EX30 has a claimed range of 275 miles and a starting price of $36,145. That puts the littlest Volvo into a very small group of EVs priced under $40,000.
Sure, the EX30 costs more than the 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EV, rated at 259 miles of range with a starting price just under $28K—except that car is going out of production by the end of this year. Until GM actually starts selling the promised $30,000 Chevy Equinox EV, GM won’t have anything priced anywhere close. There’s also the 2023 Hyundai Kona Electric (due for a redesign next year), with 258 miles of range and an MSRP starting under $35,000.
Here’s the thing, though: That EX30 is built in China. And that low price includes a 25 percent tariff on all China-made cars imported to the U.S.—giving a glimpse of just how cheap it is to build electric vehicles in China.
The average U.S. new-vehicle transaction price is now over $48,000 as of May (heavily influenced by the move away from passenger cars to light trucks). That leaves a huge opportunity for China, which reportedly has a cost advantage of roughly $10,000 in building small EVs. But only one Chinese brand—Polestar—has yet homologated its EVs for U.S. volume sale.
China-Built Cars Are Already Here
Today, tens of thousands of China-built gasoline cars are sold in the U.S. every year—under familiar brands. In 2022, those were predominantly Buick Envisions (almost 26,000) plus not quite 1000 luxury Volvo sedans. They outnumbered the only other China-made cars: 9850 Polestar 2 electric hatchbacks. Both Volvo and Polestar are part of Chinese maker Geely.
Still, Polestar is a startup brand that much of the U.S. hasn’t yet heard of. And with total sales last year of just 103,500, Buick is a minor brand in GM’s portfolio against Chevrolet (1.5 million) and GMC (500,000). While Volvo’s 102,000 sales last year matched Buick’s, it’s a more prestigious brand—which should appeal to EV buyers—and it has ambitious plans for electric vehicles.
While Polestar intends to build its Polestar 3 electric SUV in the U.S., we’ll see at least one more China-built gasoline model this year: the Lincoln Nautilus luxury SUV, both built in China for global export. Chinese imports are not a topic Detroit makers like to discuss. General Motors chose to build the North American units of its China-developed Buick Encore GX and Buick Envista small SUVs in South Korea, rather than importing them from China like the Envision.
China’s First Try
Talk to reporters who’ve covered the auto industry for a while, and they’ll reminisce about the year five Chinese automakers showed off their cars at the Detroit auto show—albeit in the basement, with less than polished press materials. That was 15 years ago, in 2008.
Widespread fear of a “Chinese invasion” of new cars marked the lead-up to that show. The idea was that Chinese makers would echo Japanese companies in the 1960s and 1970s, and South Korean companies in the 1980s and 1990s, by launching vehicles cheaper than existing competitors could manage and continuously refining them.
Then the press got a look at the cars. To put it kindly, they weren’t remotely ready for the U.S. or competitive in any developed country. Discussion of China-made vehicles ended soon after as the auto industry entered a recession, after which two of the three U.S. makers declared bankruptcy and were forcibly restructured by the White House Task Force.
Two years later, BYD said it would sell its five-passenger crossover EV utility vehicle in California by the end of 2010. The BYD e6 was certified for sale with 122, 127, or 187 miles of range (depending on year), but only a few hundred at most were sold over seven model years between 2012 and 2020. CEO Wang Chuanfu told Bloomberg in March it has no plans to sell cars in the U.S. any time soon. BYD is now concentrating on its electric bus and heavy truck businesses.
The Goal: Dominate EVs Globally
In August 2014, the Chinese Communist Party issued a long document, the title of which translates to “Made in China 2025.” The industrial-policy document laid out numerous areas of advanced technology in which, it said, China needed to become the world’s most powerful country. Those included battery metals and minerals, processing for those ingredients, cell and battery-pack manufacture, and electric vehicles.
Think back to 2014, which is eons ago in EV time. Tesla was still struggling to boost production of its Model S. The 200-mile Chevy Bolt EV hadn’t been announced; GM was still selling the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid, a concept most car shoppers didn’t even understand. And the 2014 Nissan Leaf hatchback had a paltry range of 84 miles, meaning the vast majority of buyers rejected it out of hand.
China knew it had little it could contribute to the development of vehicles with combustion engines. But its policy-makers saw the automotive future would be electric vehicles, and set about methodically controlling every possible piece of that future.
Today, the vast majority of battery metals and minerals must be processed in China. The country is the world’s largest maker of battery cells. At 5.9 million, its sales of EVs last year were 29 percent of all new vehicles sold in China—and more than half of the 10 million sold worldwide.
The so-called Inflation Reduction Act signed last August contained stringent provisions limiting U.S. government incentives to vehicles built in North America. Their cells and packs must be made here from metals and minerals sourced from a short list of countries (not including China). But it presently has a gaping loophole: any EV, including those made in China, can get the full incentives if it is leased rather than purchased.
That bill also contained large direct subsidies for U.S. production of cells and battery packs. A new report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University suggests China will increase its dominance of global anode and cathode production by 2030, despite efforts by other countries to onshore battery components and production.
It’s not likely in the near term that China will be able to build electric versions of the full-size pickup trucks and large SUVs that Detroit has fallen back on. And the Chinese entries won’t qualify for full incentives. But their cost advantage appears to be so substantial that they could take a large share of EV passenger cars and smaller SUVs—vehicles much more suited to sales in the rest of world, which full-size pickups and Chevy Suburban-size SUVs simply aren’t.
All of this is to say that China has a dominant position today in electric vehicles, their batteries, and the minerals and metals that go into them. The Volvo EX30 may be the first serious salvo in that country’s efforts to grab a large portion of North American electric-vehicle sales. And it’s not from BYD, or Nio, or Xpeng, or any other Chinese startup unknown to U.S. buyers. It comes with a well-known, well-respected, comforting Swedish badge that’s been around for decades. That may be the easiest way for Chinese makers to enter the U.S. market.
Contributing Editor
John Voelcker edited Green Car Reports for nine years, publishing more than 12,000 articles on hybrids, electric cars, and other low- and zero-emission vehicles and the energy ecosystem around them. He now covers advanced auto technologies and energy policy as a reporter and analyst. His work has appeared in print, online, and radio outlets that include Wired, Popular Science, Tech Review, IEEE Spectrum, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He splits his time between the Catskill Mountains and New York City and still has hopes of one day becoming an international man of mystery.
