Most of us expect our ecommerce orders to show up at our doorsteps, but John Karlin had to drive eight hours from Oklahoma City to Freeport, Texas, to pick up his order: a Chinese electric car.
Karlin, a registered nurse and quality process analyst, read in the summer of 2021 that a tiny $5,000 EV—the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV—was outselling Tesla’s Model 3 in the Chinese market.
“I saw an article saying the most popular EV in the world is the Hongguang Mini EV, but you can't have one. So that got me asking: Well, why is it the most popular vehicle? And why can't I have one?” Karlin says. By October of the same year, he had studied all the requirements to bring this car to the US, placed an order from a Chinese auto exporter on Alibaba, and had the car, a more premium model called the Wuling Macaron, shipped across the oceans to him.
Still, Karlin was nervous when he got to the customs. He believes he was the first American to import this vehicle model to the US, and he had to navigate uncharted territories to make it happen. Thankfully, he breezed through the various processes of getting his car and then towed it all the way back to Oklahoma City, where he would register the vehicle, insure it, and drive it every day to work at the hospital.
Karlin is definitely an outlier. Today, there are almost no Chinese electric cars sold in the US. In fact, the US has become an outlier in the world as affordable Chinese EVs have quickly taken over markets in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa.
First, they are almost never sold here officially. Compared to Mexico, where 135,000 Chinese-branded vehicles were sold in 2023, accounting for 10 percent of total car sales, the US has no Chinese auto brands on sale (although it does sell a small number of made-in-China electric or hybrid cars by Polestar, Volvo and Ford). Many Chinese companies, like BYD and NIO, have explored the possibilities to enter the US market—this is one of the largest auto markets in the world, after all—yet plans have been deterred by economic calculations, political pressures, and rising tariffs such as the 25 percent tariffs announced in March on any cars imported to the US.
For many other countries, this is where parallel import, or unauthorized gray market vehicles, comes in. But they’ve been almost nonexistent in the US since 1988, when Congress passed a law essentially forbidding the import of any foreign cars unless they go through a lengthy and costly process to prove they meet US safety and emission standards. The law was passed when Japanese and European automakers were significantly squeezing the US auto market, which sounds familiar to Chinese EV brands’ market advantage today.
For example, the law requires vehicles to pass a crash test before the model can be admitted, and it has to be initiated by a registered importer approved by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), so it’s basically impossible for an individual looking to ship a single car to the US.
The major exception to this rule is that any vehicle that’s more than 25 years old is fair game and exempt from the approval process. “Some states, like California, have further restrictions, but for the most part, 25 years means nothing is needed,” says Derek Weldon, owner of Pacific Coast Auto, which facilitates imports for the mature US market for used Japanese cars for this exact reason. While these cars often face difficulties getting insured or repaired, they can usually be registered in the US with no obstacles.
Since China’s EV boom mostly took place in the last decade, none of these electric cars could have entered through this exception. “It would be impossible to import a new or used Chinese vehicle into the US unless it was built before the year 2000, a time before any Chinese EVs were made,” Weldon says.
Finding a Workaround
Still, if you are ready to make compromises, there are some methods people can adopt to get a Chinese car legally into the United States, albeit temporarily or under significant restrictions.
What Karlin found out in 2021 was that some states, including Texas and Oklahoma, have separate safety regulations for low- and medium-speed vehicles that don’t go on highways. Traditionally, these vehicles are street-legal golf carts or farm vehicles, but he discovered that the tiny Wuling Macaron could be slotted into this category too.
“The Macaron has backup cameras; it has backup alarms that, as you get closer to items, it beeps faster and a little louder. So you know, it's so much more safe than just a regular low-speed or medium-speed vehicle,” Karlin says. He was able to register his Macaron provided that his car wouldn’t go above 35 miles per hour (hence no highway access), and he could satisfy that requirement by asking the exporter to hard-lock a speed cap for his vehicle. Since he was only using it to drive to work or grocery shopping in the urban center, Karlin says he didn't see such a limited top speed as a problem.
Another exception is that non-American citizens can bring their foreign vehicle to the country temporarily without getting an American license plate, says Cao Yang, owner of CDM Import, a Los Angeles–based company that’s exploring the nascent market for Chinese vehicle imports. Cao has helped facilitate some newer and larger Chinese cars to be shipped to the US temporarily.
For a car to be brought into the US through this route, it has to leave the country within 12 months and cannot change hands in the duration. In addition, China has its own rules for exporting cars for personal use. Normally, it only allows a vehicle to leave the country for six months, and requires the owner to pay a hefty deposit. Accounting for shipping times, it means that this specific vehicle would usually only be able to stay in the US for about three months—making it only suitable for test drives for car enthusiasts rather than everyday use. But during that short time window, “you can drive around with a Chinese license plate. They will print out a certificate of temporary importation, which you just need to stick to the windshield,” Cao says.
The same rule applies to Mexican citizens coming to the US. And since Chinese EVs have become ubiquitous in Mexico, and many people living on the border regularly commute between the two countries, Cao says it’s become easy enough to spot a Chinese EV in Los Angeles these days. Cao claims to see Chinese brands such as BYD, MG, and Roewe several times a month, and usually driven by non-Chinese owners.
The last way is going through a car manufacturer, which is allowed to bring in foreign vehicles for research, road tests, display, and other purposes. Chinese companies like BYD, Li Auto, and NIO have operations in the US and could legally bring in their own vehicles, says Cao.
Vehicles imported this way have to bear manufacturer plates and can’t be sold to individuals. However, since such vehicles are allowed on public roads, some companies could allow their employees, or even influencers, to take them for a ride. Cao says BYD has a number of its Chinese models at the company’s Pasadena design center. “Several times I’ve seen their employees driving the cars home. I even saw [one] parked where I live,” he says.
In a similar vein, Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, famously flew five Chinese EVs to Chicago last year and has been “driving them ever since,” according to his recent media interviews.
“As a normal course of business, all automakers globally buy competitive vehicles for benchmarking. When done, if the vehicle is purchased in the same country, it can be resold. Other vehicles, once benchmarking is completed, are disposed of,” Ford spokeperson Marty Gunsberg told WIRED. Have they been disposed of, we ask, or is he still driving them? “We have nothing to share on the status of these vehicles,” says Gunsberg.
Expensive Hobby
With so many restrictions in place, getting a car from China to the US is going to cost a lot more than their original price in the home market.
Weldon says while his company doesn’t import cars from China, a comparable price to import a car from Japan to the US is usually between $105 to $130 per cubic meter, which means an average car could cost somewhere between $1,000 to $2,500 in shipping alone. Then there’s the price to hire a customs agent to process it, register it at the local DOT, and pay an insurer that’s willing to take the uncommon vehicle (which is often harder than expected) before it can finally go on the road legally.
Karlin ran the numbers for his Macaron and found that he spent about $13,000 in total, while the car itself was priced below $8,000.
Those numbers are sure to have increased now as tariffs against Chinese cars have been raised significantly. Last year, the Biden administration raised tariffs on Chinese EVs from 25 to 100 percent; then Donald Trump came into power and imposed 20 percent tariffs on Chinese products and, most recently, another 25 percent tariff on all imported cars.
But money may not be the biggest problem. The Biden administration also implemented a ban on importing Chinese “connected vehicles” in January. It’d be hard to find a Chinese EV these days that doesn't have the features associated with Bluetooth, cellular, or satellite connections, so it effectively bars the import of any newer Chinese cars.
Karlin says his Macaron has been followed by police cars, but never pulled over. After going to two different tag agencies to register his car, the state of Oklahoma requested to re-audit his paperwork, which they did and he passed just fine.
As for the car itself, which had gone through such lengths to be US legal, Karlin loved it. He enjoyed the EV’s innovative design, which is very different from the American cars he’s experienced, with nice little touches like putting a USB port behind the rearview mirror so a dashcam can easily be plugged in. And the Macaron’s minuscule size proved super helpful when trying to find spots in busy hospital parking lots, and U-turns on narrow roads were a breeze.
Karlin drove the Macaron for 12 months before a US company offered to buy the vehicle from him for research. The CEO of the buyer company came to meet him in Oklahoma City, and as they sat in the car together, “I could see he's smiling. I can see the wheels turning in his head as he's realizing this and that, and looking at these different features and materials,” he says.
Cao has been to a few car enthusiasts gatherings in the US where a Chinese media company has brought along the EVs they temporarily imported. He says the American participants really liked the Chinese cars and often wanted to know how to get one. “For those who are rich enough and have the connections, they probably are thinking about importing a few and experiencing it themselves.”
