Auto tariffs are currently keeping far less expensive - yet much more advanced - Chinese EVs out of the US market, costing American consumers thousands of dollars on every car purchase.

_Just about_. After significant government bailouts.

Ultimately, this sort of protectionism tends to be expensive, and yield an inferior product.

I think the same effects can be achieved using subsidies, and I do accept such interventions can have legitimate justifications.

At significant loss to the consumer. Sure a tariff can benefit a subset of people, by costing others even more.

We could also do this without tariffs by simply taking money from some group and handing it to another.

The question was for a specific example, not some moral vague strawman.

The question is a good one, right to the heart of the claim. Without specific examples, especially ones that are not post selected (i.e., pick all tariffs at a point in time and see of that was beneficial), it is silly to claim tariffs are useful when there is ample evidence of when they cause significant harm to the economy.

So, have a case for a timepoint where the set of tariffs ended up being demonstrably beneficial for an economy?

You have to see there's a hefty dose of hypocrisy in this, right? American might has been used, quite extensively, to impose unfavorable conditions to local companies in their own soil in favor of American companies. Multiple American multi national corporations have used exploitative labor conditions in underdeveloped countries to prop up their own margins. The American government has used multiple coercive tools to de-industrialize many nations and has, in the 21st century, an explicitly paternalistic attitude towards the Western Hemisphere with literal stealing of their resources.

I understand and even respect when someone says "I'm American so I wish to maintain the status quo where the US can undercut other nations but they can't undercut us". But if there's some rose tinted view of how the US is actually the morally aggrieved one, I just can't bear it.

You can just ban imports from people who use sweatshops, or hash that out in trade agreements.

Because Trump is so fixated on tariffs, it's centered tariffs in too many conversations on these trade topics. People have developed a kind of tunnel vision here.

There are other kinds of policy levers besides tariffs for securing supply chains, promoting domestic manufacturers, or cutting out businesses that rely on slave labor from international trade. Most of them are cheaper and more effective than tariffs.