How You Get a Chinese EV into the United States

While I'm totally in favor of getting BYD and a larger variety of EVs on the road in the US, and I wish I could do a test drive of a BYD, I absolutely can't imagine that importing a $5000 2021 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, paying the fees, having it shipped (per the article) to Oklahoma (!) and then having it capped at 35mph (!!) would be in any way superior than buying a 2018 Nissan Leaf, which almost certainly would have cost the same price all told and could legally do highway speeds across the country. It is genuinely not clear from the article what advantage the very small and limiting Wuling would have had.

Does anyone know? Why would you take a 2021 35mph-capped Wuling over a 2017-18 Leaf in the US? (IIRC, they were going in the $7k-$9k range at in the early aughts.)

I find the import restrictions on Chinese EVs bizarre, but I find the desire to import a 2021 Wuling Mini EV (where there does not seem to be a price or performance advantage) equally bizarre.

> The Biden administration also implemented a ban on importing Chinese “connected vehicles”

If we could only get a ban on domestic "connected vehicles"...

And TVs, and drones, and refrigerators and on and on..

We can dream.