Your perception of Chinese auto manufacturing is very out of date. This makes as much sense as calling Japanese or Korean cars cheap and low quality.
A lack of import restrictions in no way prevents safety regulations. You could also subsidize the domestic automobile industry without having tariffs, so that we protect our domestic industrial base. These things take no imagination.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
If it were a stated policy goal of said country to develop their own indigenous EV production at scale, then yes. The same the US did for 30 years after WWII to develop its own auto industry.
The era of dumping mass amounts of cheap "good enough" products on the global market, made entirely possible by the ignored and externalized costs of dumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere via oceanic shipping, is coming to a close.
The Munroe Live episode on it should disavow people of these biases. He ends it with a strong warning about people's weird biases about Chinese manufacturing.