Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo. That Should Terrify You

mmraniki about 3 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on thedrive.com

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Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jfengel•about 2 hours ago

If you waited until today to get terrified... Then I guess you're one of today's unlucky 10,000. Congratulations, or something.

AnotherGoodName•about 1 hour ago

What makes a car ‘made in China’ (therefore over 100% tariffs) vs ‘assembled in the USA’ (therefore no tariffs)?

The battery, engine and everything else is absolutely Chinese made. I don’t know how much assembly there is honestly but i feel the Geely, err i mean Polestar was a little close to that line.

I will say the laws around this indicate just how ridiculous tariffs can be. There’s always some line to press up against and honestly if electric motors, batteries, car bodies and wheels from china have different tariffs to a car as a whole it’s always going to lead to china shipping those parts in an easy to bolt together way to ‘make a car’.

mixologic•39 minutes ago

Read up on the "chicken tax" for how long the auto industry has navigated weird assemvly games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

mattas•38 minutes ago

Reminds me of this.

There's a whole industry around reverse engineering tariff classifications to find ways to minimize all-in manufacturing cost.

For example, let's say you sell air purifiers.

Option 1 is to import an air purifier and pay the 25% tariff (or whatever the actual duty rate is) on air purifiers.

Option 2 is to import a widget that gets classified as a fan (with 5% duty) and import a widget that gets classified as an air filter (with 10% duty), then put them in the same box somewhere in the US.

Both are sold to consumers as an air purifier. But one of the options minimizes total cost to the manufacturer.

mopsi•26 minutes ago

To add to this, sneakers with a barely visible fuzzy fabric bottom are one of the best examples of tariff engineering: https://www.gazetc.com/blog/2010/08/sneaking-through-us-cust...

jleyank•about 3 hours ago

Might it be that one sells EV’s and the other sells ICE cars? Or perhaps stupidity re Volvo’s ownership? Or a missing bribe?

linzhangrun•about 2 hours ago

Volvo also has BEVs, which are rebadged Zeekr (Geely) and mainly sold in China.

dcrazy•about 1 hour ago

Volvo’s EX line of EVs is sold here in the U.S.

trhway•about 1 hour ago

the main point to me here is that such decisions should be fully public including all the input info and all the reasoning that is behind the decision, similar to a court case. Instead we have that guessing game.

garyfirestorm•about 1 hour ago

Corruption and transparency are polar opposites

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678494

elzbardico•about 2 hours ago

Probably the stupid politician behind it didn't get the memo that Volvo is no longer a swedish company?

scythe•about 1 hour ago

I think it's half this and half that Volvo is still a recognizable brand that Americans grew up with. My mother had a Volvo when I was seven. People would react if Volvo was banned. Polestar? What's that?

But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.

onesociety2022•about 1 hour ago

This is probably the reason. Volvo brand is well established in the USA while Polestar is new. So not very Americans would complain if Polestar is banned as compared to Volvo.

jauntywundrkind•about 2 hours ago

The feds also controlling who has access to AI models. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692995

It's all just this lawless personal fealty shit.

delichon•about 1 hour ago

It would be better if the AI censorship was lawless, rather than authorized by the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, since that would allow the Article III branch of the federal government to be a defense against it. The lawfulness makes it worse.

malcolmgreaves•about 1 hour ago

The same kind of thinking was used on encryption algorithms in the 90s.

SilverElfin•about 3 hours ago

It’s because the Polestar cars have a lot more electronic surveillance than the Volvo models, which have had only minor tweaks and have mostly not been updated for years.

Terr_•about 3 hours ago

If it were just about electronic surveillance, a bunch of other cars/manufacturers would be getting impeded or at least get some sort of negative scrutiny.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...

andsoitis•about 3 hours ago

None of those are Chinese-owned, as far as I can tell.

Polestar is predominantly Chinese-owned. Federal Connected Car Rules instituted a ban on the company selling cars in the United States.

killingtime74•about 2 hours ago

All of them are Chinese owned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geely. Geely, Polestar, Volvo, Zeekr, Smart, Lotus. All the same group

mukbangpervert•about 2 hours ago

Correction: it is because a major Republican donor wants Chinese cars banned, because they beat the living shit out of his offerings on quality and value.

It is silly to credulously pretend that the excuse about Chinese software has even a whiff of legitimacy.

natch•about 1 hour ago

It's hard to parse this without concluding that you are perhaps unaware that Volvo is Chinese.

mukbangpervert•about 1 hour ago

I should've said competitive Chinese EVs to be precise.

(Though I thought that anybody as smart as you think you are would've inferred that without issue)

andsoitis•about 3 hours ago

It does not terrify me.

fsckboy•36 minutes ago

>Polestar is done in the U.S. market. Its sister brand Volvo, owned by the same Chinese parent company, was spared. No one has explained why. The U.S. Federal Government is meddling with the automotive industry, the free market, and capitalism.

I'm not saying "trust the government", not at all. But meddling in China trade is absolutely not meddling with the free market.

catigula•about 1 hour ago

Why would we let China pump and dump our economy with cheap goods? We already tried that and it didn’t work.

mullingitover•about 1 hour ago

Our cheap exports: competitive, free markets maximizing efficiency and delivering value to consumers

Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump

kev009•about 1 hour ago

I think a national security argument is much more sound than an economic one, although costs are externalized in a way that isn't obvious, i.e. ecological disaster that shipping everything around the world and back (components, assemblies) is, and hollowing out a local supply chain takes virtually no time while the impact or limits of it are hidden until abrupt breakage (i.e. covid-era shortages on basic supplies, wars, or heavy handed statesmen dictating preferential access to silicon or whatever today). That is, every nation has to maintain some stake in not hollowing out completely while still participating in global commerce.

Once upon a time nations understood the issues better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_switches

peyton•about 1 hour ago

They have capital controls. Good luck moving yuan instead of Labubus.

onion2k•about 1 hour ago

The alternative to Chinese goods is not locally made goods for the majority of people. It's either Chinese goods that we pretend are locally made, or it's nothing because they can't afford the local stuff.

Cheap good for decades has meant companies have been able to depress wages to the point no one can really live without them. Removing the cheap goods without also giving up massive corporate profits would just mean most people collapse into poverty.

dmix•43 minutes ago

Nobody wants to do the hard work of developing industry, reducing cost of living and doing business so workers are more competitive, and changing all the rules that make China 10x more attractive for this sort of thing.

They just want to ban even more things.

brookst•about 1 hour ago

Might want to google “pump and dump”. Serious non-sequitur here.

DiogenesKynikos•about 1 hour ago

"Pump and dump" is when Trump talks up a stock he just bought and then sells it.

mslt•about 1 hour ago

We can’t even make expensive versions of those goods

lostlogin•about 1 hour ago

You're going to be able to compare this new way with the old way. Careful what you wish for.