The answer to this may be abundantly obvious, but: is there anything preventing Americans from visiting Canada, buying a Chinese EV there, and then driving/transporting it home?
The problem will come from sales tax and import duties when you try to register the car in your home state. In most states, you need proof that you’ve already paid the sales tax when you bought the vehicle (and import duties if the car is foreign), and if you haven’t paid enough to match your home state’s limit, you will pay additionally to match. This is why people from Alaska get so pissy when they move to the lower 48, because Alaska doesn’t have a state sales tax for vehicles, and all of a sudden they’re paying thousands of dollars just to register their car in fuckin Idaho.
Technically what you’re thinking about already exists on the southern border, plenty of people will buy Chinese cars in Mexico and then drive them up, and they’re able to get around the blanket import bans that the US has. However, they then will still have to pay any outstanding sales tax, plus the insane import tax on Chinese vehicles, making the car more expensive. However, given how cheap the Chinese cars are produced, and the relative weakness of the Mexican Peso relative to the USD, it may still come out as a cheaper option, though I’m not well versed in the Mexican auto industry.
The issue nobody ever thinks about is how will you get parts and do maintenance? Who is going to know how to fix it? Who is going to know how to get the parts? For my car I can drive it to the shop on the corner and they have a truck that comes by in the afternoon that will bring them the parts and they can fix it. That truck will never contain the parts needed to fix my imported BYD. Maybe you can get tires, but could you even get brakes for instance?
So even if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive if not impossible to maintain and repair when something goes wrong.
Brake pads and rotors are things you could probably find, but you’re right - there will eventually be something to be repaired that will require some research to get the right parts.
It would be pretty difficult to find someone who would want to work on it, so it’d be a DIY-heavy car for sure.
The answer to this may be abundantly obvious, but: is there anything preventing Americans from visiting Canada, buying a Chinese EV there, and then driving/transporting it home?
The problem will come from sales tax and import duties when you try to register the car in your home state. In most states, you need proof that you’ve already paid the sales tax when you bought the vehicle (and import duties if the car is foreign), and if you haven’t paid enough to match your home state’s limit, you will pay additionally to match. This is why people from Alaska get so pissy when they move to the lower 48, because Alaska doesn’t have a state sales tax for vehicles, and all of a sudden they’re paying thousands of dollars just to register their car in fuckin Idaho.
Technically what you’re thinking about already exists on the southern border, plenty of people will buy Chinese cars in Mexico and then drive them up, and they’re able to get around the blanket import bans that the US has. However, they then will still have to pay any outstanding sales tax, plus the insane import tax on Chinese vehicles, making the car more expensive. However, given how cheap the Chinese cars are produced, and the relative weakness of the Mexican Peso relative to the USD, it may still come out as a cheaper option, though I’m not well versed in the Mexican auto industry.
The issue nobody ever thinks about is how will you get parts and do maintenance? Who is going to know how to fix it? Who is going to know how to get the parts? For my car I can drive it to the shop on the corner and they have a truck that comes by in the afternoon that will bring them the parts and they can fix it. That truck will never contain the parts needed to fix my imported BYD. Maybe you can get tires, but could you even get brakes for instance?
So even if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive if not impossible to maintain and repair when something goes wrong.
Brake pads and rotors are things you could probably find, but you’re right - there will eventually be something to be repaired that will require some research to get the right parts.
It would be pretty difficult to find someone who would want to work on it, so it’d be a DIY-heavy car for sure.
It’s possible you wouldn’t be able to register it but I’m not well versed in car law.
Someone please respond to me once this has been answered
I tried answering to the best of my car knowledge