Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers can withstand the blow from higher import duties.
Certainly, the tariffs are not trivial. They will cost billions of euros in aggregate.
SAIC Motor, the state-owned behemoth that owns British brand MG, now faces extra duties of 38pc alone, for example, while Volvo-owner Geely could be hit with duties of 20pc and BYD about 17pc.
At the same time, all other firms are being hit with duties of 21pc or 38pc, depending on whether they cooperated or refused to cooperate with the EU investigation respectively. (Tesla and BMW fall into the former category.)
The duties are on top of an existing 10pc tariff that applies to all EVs imported from outside the EU.
Yet the hefty duties may not be enough to put off Chinese firms because their profit margins in Europe are so big.
A note produced by Rhodium, entitled “Ain’t No Duty High Enough” laid out the reasoning behind this conclusion with brutal clarity in April.
It showed that Tesla’s Model 3 and the BMW iX3 could be rendered loss-making by extra duties of just 10pc. By contrast, most of China’s EV champions could withstand duties of 30pc plus.
In the case of BYD, which controls huge swathes of its own supply chain, Rhodium predicted it would probably take duties of at least 50pc to make sales in the EU loss-making.