U.S. exports of passenger vehicles to China are at a 16-year low, dropping 58.27% in just one year and 78.42% from 2017, the year before President Trump started the ongoing trade war with China.
Many of those exports affected are Mercedes-Benz SUVs manufactured in nearby Alabama that depart from the Port of Brunswick in Georgia, the nation’s busiest seaport for vehicle exports.
For China, it looks like another precision retaliatory move against Trump’s more sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports, first levied in 2018.
Its percentage of U.S. exports has fallen from 8.33% in 2024, trailing only Canada (26.23%) and Germany (13.40%), to 4.07% through October of 2025 and 2.17% in the month of October.
In October, in addition to Canada and Germany, it trailed Mexico (8.60%), the United Arab Emirates (4.93%), South Korea (4.40%), Saudi Arabia (3.06%), the country of Georgia (2.90%), and Nigeria (2.28%).
China’s more high-profile retaliation against U.S. tariffs has been the elimination of all purchases of U.S. soybeans from June through October of last year – an unprecedented five-month stretch, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, which is through October.
Because China has traditionally bought more than half of all U.S. soybean exports, the Trump administration recently announced a bailout similar to the one announced during his first term, though, for now, it is considerably smaller.
With passenger vehicles, China has reduced its purchases from the United States from $4.41 billion through October of 2024 to $1.84 billion through the same 10 months of 2025, a decline of $2.57 billion. The decrease from 2017, when the total through October was $8.53 billion, is $6.89 billion. The last time the total fell below $1.84 billion was in the first 10 month of 2009, when the total was $753.58 million.
This comes as the United States and China pursue divergent paths for their auto industries and their citizens.
Since beginning his second term a year ago, Trump has eliminated incentives for electric vehicles; rolled back mileage standards for vehicles set to take effect in 2031, the so-called CAFE standards; and placed his bet on the future of oil and internal combustion engines. Consistent with that, Trump withdrew the United States from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, an umbrella organization under which the better-known Paris climate accord resides.
China is tacking in a different direction.
China has mandated that electric vehicles make up 40% of all sales by 2030. It, too, is planning to pull subsidies but for an entirely different reason: Oversupply. Electric vehicles, hybrids and other “new energy vehicles,” or NEVs, produced in China now account for 50% of sales there. It is also exporting about one-quarter of the EVs it builds, led by BYD.
The Chinese manufacturing juggernaut is now highly visible in the automotive sector, largely because of BYD and other Chinese EV manufacturers. BYD, could surpass Ford in the near future to rank third behind Toyota and Volkswagen for total passenger vehicle until sold globally.
In addition, Canada, historically one of the United States’ staunchest allies, announced earlier this month that it would accept 49,000 electric vehicles from China without a “most-favored-nation” tariff of 6.1%, the number of vehicles to qualify eventually rising to 70,000 in the fifth year of the agreement. Canada produces about 1.8 million cars a year, Prime Minister Mark Carney said, in trying to allay fears about the domestic auto industry.
It is, nevertheless, an about-face in a relationship whose contentiousness burst into the open at the World Economic Forum this week.
In 2024, in lockstep with the United States and President Joe Biden, Canada had imposed a 100% tariff on cars from China, essentially an embargo.
Mexico, the United States’ top trade partner, recently increased its tariffs on Chinese EVs from 20% to 50%. BYD is manufacturing in Mexico, as well as other parts of the world, to avoid tariffs much as foreign automakers do in the United States, largely in the South to avoid having to work with a unionized labor force.
That list of foreign manufacturers in the United States includes Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Volkswagen, Chinese-owned Volvo and, of course, Mercedes-Benz.
Then there’s the Port of Brunswick in Georgia.
For the last six years and 13 of the last 14, it has led the nation in exports of passenger vehicles (HS 8703) to China, accounting for an increasing percentage. In the first 10 months of 2025, that was 89.38%, the sixth consecutive year that the percentage grew.
Significantly, in 2024, the Georgia port completed $262 million in improvements, adding new warehousing and processing space, as well as 122 acres of “Ro-Ro” cargo storage.
Cars and other vehicles arrive and depart on ships that allow them to “roll off” for imports and “roll on” for exports as opposed to container ships, where “boxes” are lifted with gantry cranes.
One of the port’s goals in the expansion effort was to replace the Port of Baltimore as the nation’s leading seaport for motor vehicle trade, which it accomplished in full year of 2024. That year, the Port of Baltimore was hampered by the collapse of the Frances Scott Key Bridge.
When including border crossings, Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge has historically been responsible for the most passenger vehicle trade by value. While it was back on top through October of last year, Brunswick’s total was higher for the three years prior.
Last year, through the first 10 months of the year, Detroit had captured 11.75% of total exports and imports with Brunswick at 10.59% and Baltimore at 8.73%.
Looking at just the Port of Brunswick’s exports to China, its decrease of 52.67% is nearly identical to the drop the nation experienced with China, not surprising given its dominance in that trade, as the above chart showed.
For the United States, the collapse in China-bound passenger vehicles might signal more than a temporary trade hiccup.
