TheFP: China Is Overtaking America. In an Electric Car.

Ethan Dodd captured it best in The Free Press with a headline that says it all: “China Is Overtaking America. In an Electric Car.” His reporting lays out the scale of the challenge America now faces.

Or to borrow from WWE’s Paul Heyman: This is not a prediction. It’s a spoiler.

According to Dodd’s report in The Free Press, China’s leading EV company, BYD (Build Your Dreams), sold 4.3 million vehicles in 2024, overtaking Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker. In Germany, Chinese companies now control over 40 percent of the EV market. In Mexico, it’s 70 percent. In Brazil, it’s an astonishing 89 percent, the vast majority of which are BYD autos.

This is not just about cheaper cars. It is about industrial strategy, national security, and America’s economic future.

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, told Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s biographer: “It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen. We are in a global competition with China. And if we lose this we do not have a future at Ford.”

That was his quote. Our takeaway: this is an existential warning from the head of an iconic American company.

China did not stumble into this lead. As Dodd reported, they made a deliberate choice to bet big and long on EVs. Christian Shepherd previously reported for the Washington Post that entire cities like Jinhua were built around electric car production starting in 2015. Beijing and provincial governments poured more than 200 billion dollars in subsidies into the industry. They built the supply chains, trained the engineers, and scaled production until the cars became better and cheaper (The Free Press).

America pioneered the modern EV with GM’s EV1 in the 1990s and later Tesla’s Roadster (2008) and Model S (2012), but then hesitated. We dabbled, debated, and half-funded while China went all in with subsidies and industrial strategy.

The implications are bigger than jobs or market share. The Free Press also reported that security experts are already warning about Chinese EVs on U.S. roads and bases, raising questions about surveillance and data collection. Our allies are paying attention. We should too.

So what now? Here is the blunt truth:

1. We need an industrial strategy that matches our rhetoric. America cannot free-market its way out of this while China uses state power to dominate.
2. Secure the supply chain. Batteries, steel, chips. We need to build them here, at scale, now.
3. Sell EVs as economic security, not a culture war football. Every affordable American-made EV is one less dependency on Beijing.

This is more than a competition. It is a title fight for America’s economic future.

China is overtaking us. Ethan Dodd sounded the alarm. Now we have to answer the only question that matters: how fast can we fight back?

For a roadmap of solutions smart governors and state legislators can pursue to support American jobs and national security while Washington politicians serve Beijing, read Mike Murphy’s recent LA Times op-ed: California Can Fix Trump’s EV Mistake.