SMA Pushes the Steel-Demand Argument Into the Connected-Vehicle Fight — and the Numbers Don't Yet Back It Up

The Steel Manufacturers Association's appearance at a 1 October Congressional briefing on the Connected Vehicle Security Act is a small event with a revealing structure. The bill itself is a national-security instrument aimed at software and connectivity hardware in vehicles; SMA's executive vice president, Brandon Farris, used it to make an argument about steel demand.

"Chinese automakers would use their own steel and state-backed supply chains," Farris said. "Every car they sell here is a sale lost for a U.S. automaker and demand lost for the American steel mills our country depends on."

That is the whole of SMA's published position on the matter — a four-sentence quote in a press release with no data, no bill analysis and no attribution to any study. It is advocacy, not analysis, and should be read as such. But it is advocacy with a logic worth testing, because the same causal chain is now embedded in a bill that has already been reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee and is being positioned for must-pass legislation.

What the bill actually does

The Connected Vehicle Security Act (S. 4429, with House companion H.R. 8730) was introduced in late April and May 2026 by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) with Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and by Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI). It attracted 45 additional Senate and 58 additional House cosponsors — a bipartisan breadth that matters for its prospects. Senate Commerce reported it by voice vote on 22 July 2026; the committee report (S. Rep. 119-146) was ordered printed on 22 September.

The medium- and heavy-duty extension deserves more attention than it usually gets. Trucks and buses are considerably more steel-intensive per unit than passenger cars, and the 2028/2032 timetable means the commercial-vehicle segment — where Chinese participation in the US market is negligible — will eventually face a compliance architecture designed for passenger cars.

Equally important: much of this already exists in regulation. The Bureau of Industry and Security's January 2025 final rule (90 FR 5360) already bars MY2027+ connected vehicles with China- or Russia-linked software and blocks China/Russia-owned manufacturers from selling connected vehicles in the US, with a MY2030 hardware restriction to follow. BIS has already been granting and denying specific authorisations — Volvo Cars received one in May 2026; Polestar was declined and said it would exit US new-vehicle sales from MY2027.

The steel-demand claim, examined

Farris's proposition has two parts: that Chinese-brand vehicles sold in the US displace US-built vehicles, and that displaced US-built vehicles mean less American steel. The first is directionally reasonable. The second is where the arithmetic gets thin.

Begin with scale. Chinese-brand light vehicles have essentially no established US market presence, and the BIS rule already forecloses the pathway for China-owned manufacturers. The bill's marginal effect on vehicle volumes in the near term is therefore close to zero — a point the Congressional Budget Office made explicitly, noting that because BIS rules already cover sub-10,000-lb connected vehicles from China and Russia and Iran/North Korea imports are already broadly prohibited, "few additional people would be subject to civil or criminal penalties." CBO scored the bill's revenue and direct spending effects as insignificant, with net deficit reduction under $500,000.

Now the steel content. A North American light vehicle carries on the order of 1,500–1,600 lb of steel excluding iron castings, according to industry material-content forecasts, with roughly 480 lb of that being advanced and ultra-high-strength grades. A useful sanity check on the demand effect: a hypothetical 100,000 Chinese-brand vehicles kept out of the US market represents, at ~0.7 tonnes of steel per vehicle, on the order of 70,000 tonnes of contained steel — before any deduction for the steel content of the substitute vehicles consumers buy instead. Against total US steel consumption in the tens of millions of tonnes, that is a rounding error.

The more consequential issue is not volume but grade and sourcing. The American steel that goes into vehicles is disproportionately flat-rolled, coated and advanced high-strength product from integrated and EAF flat-rolled producers — precisely the segments where import competition and automotive contract pricing have been most contested. SMA represents the electric-arc-furnace segment, which it says accounts for 70% of domestic steelmaking and which has been steadily extending into automotive flat products. Farris's real argument, stripped of the connected-vehicle framing, is about protecting the automotive contract book — the highest-value, most technically demanding outlet for domestic flat steel.

That argument is legitimate, but it is a trade argument, not a connected-vehicle-security argument, and conflating the two carries risk for the steel industry's credibility. If the security rationale for the bill is data exfiltration and remote control of vehicles, then steel content is irrelevant to its merits. If the rationale is industrial base, then the bill is a weak instrument — it restricts a market share Chinese brands do not have.

Why SMA is on this panel

The briefing was convened with Securing America's Future Energy, a nonpartisan Washington organisation whose Energy Security Leadership Council includes 22 retired four-star admirals and generals and a group of former Fortune 500 chief executives. SAFE's own September letter to Congressional leadership made the steel link explicitly: "domestic auto manufacturing sustains demand for steel, aluminum, batteries, and semiconductors that the U.S. military cannot source at scale on its own."

That is the origin of the "arsenal" framing in the briefing title, and it explains SMA's presence. The defence-industrial-base argument gives a steel trade grievance access to a national-security vehicle that a Section 301 petition or an antidumping case cannot. SMA has pursued the conventional routes too — it publicly backed USTR's March 2026 Section 301 investigations into structural excess capacity. But the connected-vehicle bill offers something different: a bipartisan, veto-resistant pathway, with SAFE's letter urging enactment through the National Defense Authorization Act "or other appropriate must-pass legislation."

What to watch

• Vehicle for passage. SAFE's push for the NDAA is the operative strategy. The Senate has reportedly deferred further floor action until after the midterms, which makes a lame-duck NDAA the most plausible route. Attachment to must-pass legislation is how this bill becomes law — or does not.
• Commerce's rulemaking on vehicles over 10,000 lb. Due by the end of 2028, effective by the end of 2032. This is the provision most likely to touch real steel tonnage, and the commercial-vehicle supply chain has had almost no public discussion of it.
• The supply-chain resilience assessment. The bill directs Commerce to assess automotive supply chain resilience and recommend policies to reduce dependence on covered countries for critical automotive technologies. That assessment is the natural place for the steel-content question to be treated seriously rather than rhetorically.
• Authorisation precedent. Commerce's power to grant authorisations and advisory opinions, with Congressional review of new authorisations by joint resolution of disapproval from 2030, creates a politically contestable discretion. The Volvo and Polestar decisions are the template.

The analytical bottom line

SMA's intervention is best understood as an EAF-sector positioning move: securing a seat at the table in a security debate that will shape automotive sourcing for a decade. That is sensible institutional politics. But readers should be clear about what has and has not been demonstrated. No published analysis establishes that Chinese connected vehicles represent a material steel-demand loss to US mills today. CBO judges the bill's economic effects to be negligible because the regulatory baseline already does most of the work. And the bill's real steel relevance lies in the commercial-vehicle provisions of 2028–2032, not in the passenger-car market that animated the briefing.

The steel industry's stronger case — protecting the automotive flat-rolled contract book against subsidised overcapacity — stands on its own merits and is being pursued through Section 301. Borrowing the national-security vocabulary may win the argument faster; it also invites the question of why, if the threat is to the arsenal, the remedy is a connectivity ban on a market segment Chinese brands do not supply.

One factual note: SAFE's April 2026 statement endorsed "S. 2040, the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026," while the Senate report and SAFE's September release use S. 4429. The bill-numbering history is not reconciled in the public record and may reflect an earlier discussion draft.