Maybe Europe should step up its game and actually finally start producing proper EVs for accessible prices. I'm sorry, but banning chinese EVs won't save us from climate change. This is a move to save the european billionaire class that owns all of these companies that refuse to innovate here. I say: let the chinese bring their EVs over. It's capitalism after all :) Let them compete. Wasn't that the story they kept telling us? About how competition breeds innovation? Funny how that is no longer the case now that true competition exists and not just a bunch of european car manufacturers that make up a monopoly to keep us buying their shitty expensive cars.

The ICE aren't any better. My god, what you can spend on a vehicle these days is insane, and you know it's going to be trash in 5 years.

In the EU they would struggle to significantly cut the purchase price without screwing themselves with their liability with leased cars, particularly those on PCP (which is one of the most common ways to buy a brand new car) as the manufacturers own the liability on that final payment (via their finance arm) not the purchaser. If they cut new prices significantly then older cars will also see a significant drop in resale price, those final payments are already finely balanced.

VW in particular fucked up as they put in a janky in car control system after removing all the buttons, stuck the largest battery behind the expensive high performance motor setup only (more people want range not performance at this point, this was a cheap counter productive cash grab trying to force people to a more expensive model), and was at least a generation behind on the EV side of things for charging and efficiency. Oh, and they killed the cheapest version of the car as well. Now they shut down their EV factory and fire workers, blaming falling industry wide EV sales rather than their own fuck ups, and they have the most to lose from China eating their business from the bottom.

China has been doing this for centuries now. You couldnt even break into the chinese consumer space if the CCP decides that you might be a danger to their own industry.
So it's kinda hypocritical to now claim the EU is doing something because its china.

Take a look at what VW did to the British car market with illegal subsidies from the German Government. Then look at VW being caught in the emissions scandle. Long story short, cheating is profitable.

It is not like European companies are not investing into EVs, but that EVs are different. The big advantage is battery technology, but most batteries are bought from third parties. Only Tesla and BYD have large battery production of their own. So everybody else buys them from other companies. So it is hard to be better on that technological front. The rest is a generally nice interior and software. Interior is something Europeans can do, but it has relativly little value add. What is more important is software and that is difficult for manufacturing based companies like traditional car companies.

This is not to say that European companies can not win this or lack innovation. They make good EVs, but so do the Chinese and that means a war on price. Europe is in a disadvantage on that. However there are solutions being planned like large battery plants by European manufacturers and better software development.

Invest in public transit, bike infrastructure, cargo bikes. No one (except rural folks) should be dependent on owning a car, anyways.

This is very nice, but even better would be to make rents in cities dirt cheap again. First step would be to not sell any land but only lease it. And stop subsidizing the fucking countryside that grabs the wealth of society, ruins its political landscape and destroys the planet for it in return.