Canada imposes a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles, matching the US

I'm all for a tarrif on imported EVs if we start making affordable domestic ones. Between the carbon tax, affordability crisis,and Canada's goal of getting rid of ICE, we aren't helping Canadians by imposing this tarrif. This is clearly pandering to american auto manufacturers who have no interest in competing in the market, instead they beg governments to ban or tax their competition to keep the "free market" healthy.

I disagree with the idea there are no affordable EVs in Canada, based on the numbers and purchasing habits of new car buyers anyway. If the average price of a new vehicle in Canada is $66,8XX , and EVs can be had for below that, then for the new car buying market the EVs are affordable, but just not what people want to buy (for whatever reason).

For me, I traded my ICE vehicle for an EV in 2019 and I save money every single month when you add the financing to the price of gas I used to buy. I traded a Mazda 3 Sport for a Chevy Bolt EV, and even though the Mazda was about $15,000 cheaper, and even though it got about 7.7 l/100km real world fuel economy, it is cheaper to drive the EV because ICE operating costs are so much higher.

I was in the market for a second used EV as well, and there are right now recent year model EVs in the mid 20/low 30s for sale. Now these are not large vehicles, but they are affordable especially after operating costs are included. The prices for the most affordable new and used EVs right now are actually at or around the average price for a new and used vehicle in 2019.

I think though, what is really going on with new car buyers, is that people compare a Fiat 500e, or a Chevy Bolt EV, or another small EV, to larger ICE vehicles costing $10 or $15 thousand dollars less and then conflate their desire for the larger vehicle with affordability. The EV is not affordable because I must have a certain ride height, or certain features. They want the larger vehicle, the larger vehicle is cheaper out the door, therefore the EV is not affordable. This is a calculation done without considering fuel economy, changing fuel prices. In reality, they could afford it, just through the shifting of operating costs onto capital costs, but they don't want it.

I generally agree with you on oil subsidies though.

The only reason they're cheap is because of government subsidies back in China and the goal is to eliminate the competition so they can then raise their price and make us dependent on them even more than we already are.

Cause your not rich?

Buy a bicycle

Funny you're being downvoted. Apparently the government sending billions in subsidies to companies that offshore most manufacturing to China anyway is the free market. But China doing the same thing isn't.

It will help keep prices competitive in the long term. Chinese EV makers aren't competing in a free market as they are heavily subsidized by the government. It's no different from what Silicon Valley VCs do, pump loads of capital into a new industry so that it's difficult for any competitors to emerge. Once a company has a monopoly on a market innovation suffers, products stagnate or actively get worse, prices increase with a lack of competition, and the consumer suffers. In the case of EVs, there is the added issue of manufacturing capacity which is important for security. While I would love a cheap new EV now, I would prefer for my children to have sustainable cheap EVs in the future.

I get what you're saying, but the only way to get there is to heavily expand our population so our sphere of influence becomes significant enough that we can exert some control of a situation.

We barely extract the resources we have aside from oil, our population is miniscule, we spend all our money on housing, we stagnate wages, barely manufacture anything and brain drain talent to the US due to lack of wages/opportunities.

Until we reach a critical mass of population and are able to mine + manufacture our resources and establish some form of market specialization, we will remain insignificant on the global scale.

The reason why it's logical to do it in the US is the same as why it's logical to do it in Canada

This is why the NDP should be in charge. They're already used to taking directions from Trudeau.

/s

An e-bike probably.

In seriousness, you're not going to get a very valuable answer with such a broad question. They can be quite cheap, but have little range. Elaborating on what you'd want in an EV would help people provide better answers.

For cars, Chevrolet Bolt, 40k before incentives.

My hope: increased costs make people demand domestic manufacturing, companies and governments actually listen and decide import costs aren't worth it and move all manufacturing back inside their own borders.

Politicians like to bullshit about "job creation" all day, but this, massively expanding domestic manufacturing capabilities, would create more jobs than any program put out since WWII.

Until transit becomes reasonable to use (outside of the 5 biggest cities) cars aren't going anywhere, no matter how much we might want a less car-centric society.

Having an increasing percentage of cars be less bad is a worthy interim step, while at the same time trying to improve the practicality of other means of getting to where you need to go.