Congress wants to know how deep China’s fingers are in the American auto industry. It’s a fair question. It’s also one the federal government has already spent the better part of a year answering, in documents with actual deadlines attached, while this new bill can’t set one until 2028.
On August 28, Representatives Diana Harshbarger (R-TN) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) introduced the Automotive National and Economic Security Act of 2026. Read past the headline and the bill is refreshingly simple: it orders the Secretary of Commerce to study foreign ownership stakes, joint ventures, technology transfers and intellectual property risk tied to automakers connected to foreign adversaries, then deliver an unclassified report to two congressional committees. The clock doesn’t start until the bill becomes law, and even then, Commerce gets up to two years to finish writing it.
No tariffs. No divestiture order. No new banned-parts list. Just a study — one that arrives, at the earliest, sometime in 2028.
Harshbarger frames the urgency in blunt terms: “China has a playbook, and we’ve watched them run it,” she said, citing critical minerals, shipbuilding and batteries as prior chapters. Dingell describes herself as a longtime advocate for the industry’s workforce and frames the bill as an attempt to level a playing field tilted by state subsidies.
Both lawmakers are right that something is happening. What’s odd is the idea that anyone needs two more years and a government report to prove it.
The Rules That Actually Bite Are Already Written
Here’s the part that should actually get a car owner’s attention: the rule that matters, with dates that matter, is already on the books. In January 2025, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security finalized a regulation prohibiting Vehicle Connectivity System software tied to China or Russia starting with model year 2027 vehicles. The hardware equivalent — the physical modules, not just the code — gets banned starting January 1, 2029, effectively model year 2030. Those are real compliance deadlines with real engineering consequences, and both will arrive before Congress’s new study is anywhere close to finished.
That’s not the only enforcement mechanism already running. A 100% tariff on Chinese-built EVs, and a 25% tariff on EV batteries, critical minerals, steel and aluminum, have been in effect since 2024. The Department of War has separately added BYD, China’s largest automaker by sales, to its list of Chinese military companies. None of that required a two-year study. It just required an agency willing to use authority it already had.
Put together, that’s the real story hiding inside this bill: lawmakers are ordering a multi-year investigation into a problem the executive branch already started regulating on a fixed timeline. The study isn’t laying groundwork. It’s grading a test that’s already half over.
Detroit Already Signed Up For The Thing Congress Is Worried About
While Washington debates state-owned enterprises and technology transfer, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have all gone out and built exactly the kind of relationships this bill is supposed to scrutinize. Stellantis turned its 21% stake in Chinese EV startup Leapmotor into a 51-49 joint venture and promoted its China COO to a global leadership role last month. Ford partnered with Geely, parent of Volvo and Polestar, to build next-generation vehicles in Spain, and Ford’s own CEO has said publicly that Chinese competition is pushing every automaker to get leaner and smarter, which is a polite way of admitting Detroit needs what Chinese engineering teams currently do better.
GM went further. Its new Buick Electra E wasn’t just assembled with Chinese help — it was developed entirely at a technical center GM co-runs with SAIC Motor, the state-linked Chinese automaker. A Buick, arguably the most American-grandpa of American nameplates, engineered from the ground up on Chinese soil. It still sold more than 10,000 units in May alone.
Mercedes Is The Cautionary Tale Nobody Wants To Say Out Loud
Mercedes-Benz isn’t a joint-venture story. It’s an ownership story, and it’s the clearest example of why this issue is messier than banning bad actors. Roughly a fifth of the company’s shares now sit with Chinese entities, split almost evenly between a stake held by Geely’s own founder and chairman and a similar stake held by the state-linked BAIC Group. That ownership exists independently of, but sits awkwardly next to, a separate Connected Vehicle Security Act moving through the Senate, which would ban Chinese-linked connected-vehicle hardware and software outright. The bill’s own co-sponsor, a former Mercedes dealer whose son still sells the brand, has had to publicly insist Mercedes isn’t the target.
This wouldn’t be the first time ownership, rather than engineering, decided a car’s fate in America. Just ask Polestar.
The Auto Industry Has Run This Playbook Before
American automakers spent the 1980s insisting Japanese competition was an existential threat, then spent the 1990s building transplant factories in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee to survive it. The threat didn’t disappear. It became the workforce. What’s different this time is that the vulnerability isn’t stamped steel or engine blocks — it’s software, telematics and the data pipeline running through a car’s connectivity module. You can inspect a fender for a stamping defect. Auditing a supply chain of firmware for what it phones home is a different kind of problem, and it’s the one BIS’s rule is actually trying to solve.
Who Actually Feels This First
That distinction matters most to the people who fix cars and insure them, not the people who write bills about them. Telematics control units, infotainment head units and ADAS sensor suites are exactly the parts most likely to be caught up in this rule, and swapping a banned module after a collision could mean redesigned parts, new part numbers and longer waits at the body shop — a cost that shows up in a claims file years before it shows up in a headline.
So take the new bill for what it is: a bipartisan agreement that the question is worth asking, filed two years after the executive branch already started answering it with something more binding than a press release. Congress wants a study to tell it how deep China’s roots go in the American auto industry. Most of that answer is already parked on dealer lots, wearing a Buick badge, a Ford grille and a three-pointed star.