Australia is more than nothing, but a country with 26 million people and about 1.2 million new car sales annually isn’t tipping the scales of the global market too much. They’re also geopolitically aligned with the USA so the medium to long term outlook is negative for China trade relations.

> SEA has money to buy things even if they don’t make many cars outside of maybe Thailand

Every region has money to buy things and their business isn’t worthless, but SEA isn’t a big consumer market yet and isn’t going to be making up for the loss of/reductions in the big consumer markets. There’s only so many sales that the region can absorb even if we don’t factor in the fact that the region is adjacent to and frequently the target of Chinese military belligerence recently and for centuries. There is increasing regional geopolitical alignment with the USA albeit at arms length.