Is the long freeze on Chinese automakers selling cars in the US finally starting to thaw? China is the largest auto market in the world and now the largest car exporter, too. But high tariffs and geopolitical tensions have kept Chinese automakers away from US customers. Many of those cars are ready for primetime and are fully competitive with current offerings in the United States.
Geely is among those Chinese carmakers that want to sell their cars here. It’s already sailed past one of two hurdles any of them need to clear to do that: Its Volvo Cars division already has an assembly plant in South Carolina that would let it build its cars domestically. That plant now builds the Volvo EX90 electric SUV and the Polestar 3 that shares its platform; it will add the Volvo XC60 late this year.
Few US buyers realize it, but Geely has controlled the Swedish automaker for more than 15 years. Is the Volvo factory a possible foothold for Geely’s future in the US?
Software from “countries of concern”
The challenge for Geely is that any Chinese company selling cars in the US must certify that all software for autonomous driving, and all hardware and software for connectivity and telematics, has not been developed in or controlled by a “country of concern” (China or Russia). Those strictures sit within a Commerce Department rule that took effect in March 2025; it’s intended to protect the country from hostile use of advanced auto technologies by adversary countries.
Initiated by Joe Biden’s administration, the rule was finalized by Donald Trump’s second administration. The provisions on software take effect next month for cars in model years 2027 and later. The hardware ban follows in three years, starting with model year 2030 cars. The bans sought to avert several types of national security risk.
Is the Volvo factory a possible foothold for Geely’s future in the US?
One goal was to prevent an adversary government from gaining access to the cars via telematics to control their movements — whether taking over the driving remotely or mass-disabling them. Another was to ensure the vehicles could not gather personally identifiable information on people of interest in the US (corporate executives, members of the military, celebrities, and more). The fear is that the vehicles could record voice and facial recognition data, their travel patterns, their contacts, their phone calls, and much more — all of which could be used to train artificial intelligence programs. A final goal, broadly, was to prevent vehicles produced by makers in those countries from capturing detailed images and data on US roads and the built environment through which the cars traveled.
Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry, takes a more jaundiced view of this risk. The actions it guards against are “a very inefficient way of spying,” he said, as compared to spy satellites, mobile-phone data, and commercial map data. For all the risks cited, he suggested Americans should be far more concerned about the “data being gathered by Flock and Palantir than anything Chinese cars might send to Beijing.”
Avery Ash, CEO of Securing America’s Future Energy, or SAFE, emphasized the rules were established solely for reasons of national security, and are not concerned with national economic competitiveness. SAFE is a nonprofit think tank that advocates and lobbies for policies that reduce the US dependence on oil; it sees connected, autonomous EVs as an important pathway toward that goal. Data storage locations and governance remain concerns, Ash said, so the rules take a very broad look at what constitutes “control” by a Chinese entity. Where the software was designed is irrelevant; it’s about effective control of the company that wrote it and the firms that designed the hardware it runs on.
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