The two largest golf cart manufacturers within the United States are asking for help with an existential threat: a flood of Chinese imports.
Club Car LLC and Textron Specialized Vehicles Inc., each based near Augusta, Georgia, this week called on the Biden administration to impose a one hundred pc tariff on Chinese-made golf carts and other slow-moving, often battery-powered personal vehicles – making them reminiscent of U.S. tariffs on conventional Chinese electric cars.
“Chinese import volumes have increased rapidly, capturing larger market share in the passenger vehicle market while simultaneously leveraging the pricing benefits of Chinese government subsidies to extend their advantage,” Club Car President and CEO Mark Wagner said in an emailed statement Friday. “We had to take action.”
U.S. imports of Chinese golf carts and other recreational buggies have increased sixfold since 2020, partially because they’re shipped under a product classification that carries a lower tariff than regular-sized electric vehicles. The Chinese carts often avoid higher duties by crossing the border on the lower tariff rate after which being modified within the U.S., in response to lawyers for the American corporations.
As a result, golf carts and similar vehicles can “avoid the planned increased tariffs on electric vehicles” that the Biden administration announced in May, in response to a letter filed this week with the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington.
While this can be a close call between the world’s largest economies, it highlights the multitude of loopholes, workarounds, unintended consequences and legal dilemmas that include imposing tariffs across large parts of the economy.
Comment period
On Friday, the deadline for public comments on the US Department of Commerce’s so-called Case 301, which justifies tariffs on Chinese goods, ended.
The request from Club Car and Textron, maker of EZ-GO and Cushman carts, was one among a whole lot of other requests for tariff protection or relief filed throughout the USTR comment period. The two corporations submitted their request jointly in a bunch called the American Personal Transportation Vehicle Manufacturers Coalition.
According to the documents, imports of Chinese golf carts and one other tariff classification for similar products called “specially designated vehicles” totaled $916 million last 12 months, up from $148 million in 2020.
Club Car and Textron’s competitors in China have “substantially and systematically undersold domestically produced vehicles, resulting in a deterioration in domestic industry performance and a sharp decline in U.S. industry production, capacity utilization, shipments, employment, and financial performance in 2024,” in response to the June 25 letter from Washington law firm Wiley to the USTR.
Your contact with the USTR follows a related case filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission alleging dumping of Chinese golf carts and looking for relief in the shape of antidumping and countervailing duties.
Robert DeFrancesco, a partner in Wiley’s international trade practice, said the case will take a few 12 months to litigate.
