Catalytic Converter stolen, next steps?

Yeah. Thankfully the dealership stood their ground and argued that the aftermarket options were not suitable. And also thankfully Allstate didn’t fight them on the labor rates.

If it’s wasn’t a Prius with a heat exchanger built into the exhaust and limited aftermarket options to begin with I’m not sure if the result would have been the same.

 

Feels like you're trolling, but I'll post a basic lesson in microeconomics anyway...

1. Cheap labor and no environmental controls, plus of course a plentiful supply, is why China is the world's largest producer. There are minerals in other countries too, but they're more expensive to mine, so on a global scale companies don't bother unless the price goes up. Frankly I appreciate that US workers make a livable wage and the companies aren't allowed to dump all the sludge from their operations into my drinking water.
2. Increased demand due to rare earths usage in batteries, more efficient motors, and increased emissions control efforts are (generally) why the prices went up. China can't "raise their prices as much as they want", but they can increase prices some and demand will start to shrink. Prices won't go to infinity because mining companies could start up new mines in other countries, but again the rare earth mineral cost has to increase enough that this is profitable.

Government intervention in these cases typically amounts to either (a) giving tax breaks to mining companies to mine minerals in the US, or (b) taxing imports from China to make them more expensive. Honestly (a) is easier (because it can be difficult to tell what country a mineral came from and you might not want to apply the same tax rate to every country) and also "better" for consumers (because it discourages higher prices, unlike an import tax which works by making everything more expensive in order to allow domestic producers to operate).

The US BTW has chosen option b.