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.
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.
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.
They need to balance between the Silicon Valley oligarchs desires and the MAGA voters possible reactions. Banning Volvo would probably not be well received by MAGA, at least Trump would need a bit more time to build the case that these vehicles are now unreliable.
Having spent some time in California and seen things town by town at a very granular level, I think woke voters are the ones driving Volvos.
So while I didn’t quite follow that reference, it’s true that if Trump were to ban them for simply being owned by China, then he’d be kind of screwed because he’d then have to ban all his own merch like the Trump phone and his made-in-China MAGA hats.
As I mentioned above, it's not fringe to ban Chinese hardware for security concerns. They've been surreptitiously planting undisclosed control equipment. [0] No company would knowingly add more costs and complexity for nothing in return. And if the Chinese maker didn't know about the trojan tech, then it's even more concerning.
Huh? Polestar and Volvo’s electric models share a very large part of their software stack, see [1]. I’ve seen forum posts talking about where the service centre accidentally loaded the Volvo software onto a Polestar. There is really quite a lot shared between the vehicles of these two companies.
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.
Some people have been pointing out for decades that granting unchecked discretionary powers to the executive branch is a hazard. Now there is an executive using them to do things a lot of people don't like.
Are the people who don't like it going to withdraw those powers the next time they have the opportunity? The main alternative is more of this.
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.
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.
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’.
I think my favorite part would be where they were unbolting entire seats and feeding them directly into industrial shredders.
"Ford imported all of its first-generation Ford Transit Connect models as "passenger vehicles" by including rear windows, rear seats, and rear seat belts.[1] The vehicles were exported from Turkey on ships owned by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), arrived in Baltimore, and were converted back into light trucks at WWL's Vehicle Services Americas, Inc. facility by replacing rear windows with metal panels and removing the rear seats and seat belts.[1] The removed parts were not shipped back to Turkey for reuse, but shredded and recycled in Ohio.[1] The process exploited the loophole in the customs definition of a light truck; as cargo does not need seats with seat belts or rear windows, presence of those items automatically qualified the vehicle as a "passenger vehicle" and exempted the vehicle from "light truck" status. The process cost Ford hundreds of dollars per van, but saved thousands in taxes.[1]"
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.
> The solution is to tax the capital account instead (tobin tax)
Isn't that just going to further advantage multinational corporations that don't have to move currency in order to move resources because they're all within the same corporation?
I think you could only avoid it indefinitely if your operations are balanced, i.e. you make some stuff in China and sell it in the US, but also make something in the US and sell it in China.
Otherwise if you make everything in China and sell it in the US you'll eventually have to transfer USD from your US operation to your Chinese operation to pay suppliers, labour, taxes etc.
You wouldn't have to make it in the US, or even make it at all, you would only have to pay for it there. You also wouldn't have to deliver it to the place you want the money to end up, only to the location of someone willing to pay you there. You could be paying US dollars at a bank in New York to a company based in Australia to have them deliver iron ore to a company in India willing to pay you for it in China.
I think actually Tobin tax is the wrong word sorry. I don't mean just taxing FX transactions, I mean taxing all cross-border capital flows. So yes you can do everything in dollars (and a lot of the time the dollars never need to leave New York)
But eventually you do have to pay the workers and taxes in China in yuan, and ultimately that money comes from the US consumer, making some kind of US capital account transaction inevitable?
Maybe I'm missing something but I think it does work because ultimately a current account deficit mathematicaly has to be exactly balanced with a capital account surplus. You can attack the current account side with tariffs, but it's actually more elegant to attack the capital account surplus instead
Radiolab[0] had a story about this involving "toys" vs "dolls".
"Dolls," which represent human beings, are taxed at almost twice the rate of "toys," which represent something not human - such as robots, monsters, or demons. As soon as they read that, Sherry and Indie saw dollar signs. it just so happened that one of their clients, Marvel Comics, was importing its action figures as dolls. And one set of action figures really piqued Sherry and Indie's interest: The XMEN, normal humans who, at around puberty, start to change in ways that give them strange powers.
So Sherry and Indie went down to the customs office with a bag of XMEN action figures to convince the US government that these mutants are NOT human. That argument eventually became a court case that went on for years.
the justification given for the ban (provided in other sources) is that Polestar's software stack is made in China. The theoretical spooky thing is China forcing some "evil" software update that stops all the Polestars.
The Volvo distinction is ... I mean maybe the Volvo software stack is in Europe or the US. Maybe it's also in China!
I do not really subscribe to this philosophy but what's going on isn't a "Polestar would be tar riffed" thing. It's an outright "you can't sell em" thing
I think there's a reasonable argument that modern cars are so full of cameras and other surveillance gear that there should be some rules about where this data is sent and how it's handled.
The not-so-theoretical spooky thing is that the car requires an account to operate, and all its activity ends up being linked to a very concrete person, in most of the cases, and that's being vaccumed by China.
It's a perfectly valid concern, obviously. However in the current context of a blatantly corrupted government this might be a squeeze for money or just something done out of spite.
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.
>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.
"Free market" implies regulators aren't picking winners and losers etc. If China subsidizes their export industry to make manufacturing in other countries uncompetitive then it's already not a free market.
Ideally what you would want is to get China to stop doing that, but now propose a mechanism to get them to.
Commercial airliners cost tens of millions of dollars, does that imply a company that makes them isn't being subsidized by their government?
China subsidizes (among other things) battery manufacturing, which is the biggest single cost for making EVs. If you get your batteries cheaper than competing companies then you can make premium cars with an electric range at the high end of the market and then use the subsidized cost to provide other amenities that cause customers to choose your product over alternatives even at a premium price. It allows you to take the high end of the market on value just as well as the low end on cost.
>How is preventing a Chinese brand from selling here not meddling in the free market?
because trade balances are established by free markets, but China doesn't allow many of our goods and does not allow free market competition. Also "strategic dumping" to establish supremacy in markets which can later be exploited.
also, "free market" does not have anything close to a precise meaning; i used it because you used it but it's highly ambiguous, better to rephrase sentences to accurately include the phrase "market clearing price" while identifying external strictures which might move the market clearing price away from where it should be.
The policy of the United States is currently a roulette wheel suffering from dementia that believes that Siri is a Norwegian supermodel they can use to seed the future Herrenrasse.
What does it even mean to "get updates from China"?
Software these days is distributed and globalized in virtually every sense. Polestar is headquartered in Sweden and much of their software development is in the UK.
Volvo's ultimate owner is the same state-aligned Chinese conglomerate.
The question isn't "why ban Polestar", it is "why ban Polestar without banning Volvo". They are both headquartered in Sweden, they are both owned by the same conglomerate, and they are often even both manufactured in the same factories. So what makes them different enough to warrant banning only one of them?
From other comments where telemetry goes to, and possibly the level of remote control in the cars.
It appears to be a general ban on "connected vehicles" controlled from certain countries even if built in the US[1], so I would guess that Volvo does not meet the criteria for that.
Because Polestar isn't a household name in the US. Most people have no clue they are even selling Polestars here. Volvo is very well known brand that has been established in the US for many years. and most people don't know it's Chinese-owned now. If someone said "ban Volvo" people would actually stop and wonder WTF is going on. You say "ban some brand of Chinese EV that you've never heard of," people aren't really going to care that much.
If we have problems with consumer-hostile behaviour like tracking users, remotely disabling vehicles, or other things like that we should outlaw those behaviours in products used in the US.
We will never do that because Western auto manufacturers want to be able to behave badly in the same way Chinese manufacturers might and they have a firm grasp on the American governments leash.
'Its from China' is a dumb reason not to allow a product into the market. If there are specific features, standards, etc that should be followed, enforce those.
I agree with you that consumer hostile behaviour should be illegal. Realistically, governments want this because it gives them more control so its not going to happen.
"its from China" is a good reason for many countries. A lot of countries are currently worried about their dependence on the US. They would have a lot more to worry about if they were dependent on China. Is it a good idea for European countries to put themselves in a position where China could disable half the vehicles in their country? The same for every Asian country that might have a dispute with China. Just borrowing money from China has proved to be a disaster for some Asian countries even without a dispute.
I'm gonna blow your mind here... Perhaps we need open firmware in our devices so we know if China, the US government, or Google is adding backdoors to the hardware we own?
Why is it that when we deal with China it's acceptable not to trust the vendor but when we buy from literally anyone else we have to accept the enormous number of backdoors and implicit spying that comes with it?
China isn't the problem. The perverse incentives created when we don't own our own gear is.
> I'm gonna blow your mind here... Perhaps we need open firmware in our devices so we know if China, the US government, or Google is adding backdoors to the hardware we own?
Yes, dream on. How are you going to politically push through something very few people even understand? I covered this is in the first line of my comment.
> Why is it that when we deal with China it's acceptable not to trust the vendor but when we buy from literally anyone else we have to accept the enormous number of backdoors and implicit spying that comes with it?
You have to accept it from someone. You seem to have missed my point that for many people (and countries) trusting Chinese vendors is worse than trusting the alternatives.
Why do we have to accept it? People assume so many distasteful aspects of our society are inviolable features of reality and not just something some people decided.
It has nothing to do with consumer hostile behaviors. Its bad when a hostile foreign government has control over and information about (think blackmail, not ads) your citizens.
A junior engineer on the x-500 future fighter jet drives a polestar and seems to be visiting the house of a single woman (which they know from tiktok days) while his family would probably think he would be at work. Will this guy throw away his family or start handing over USB keys?
Any even mildly intelligent politician is going to try and block this ability.
> Its [sic] bad when a hostile foreign government has [...] information about [...] your citizens
How many domestic automotive manufacturers does America have, and how many times has the current administration threatened annexation of their Northern "ally"?
This is, at best, hypocrisy; and being on the recieving end of the annexation threats, I'm disinclined to use the most generous interpretation of America's "Rules for me but not for thee" attitude
What’s your actual point here? Is it that no country should ever trust another because they can one day turn hostile? Are you advocating that all global trade of electronic-based products should be banned?
You're being confused by nationalism into not seeing that you're making exactly the point I just did. The bad thing here is not that China knows where you are 24/7. It's that anybody does. Why is it bad for China to be able to spy on you but acceptable that Google can? The US government? How about we just STOP THE SPYING? Regardless of who is doing it?
But GMs security of their tracking information is 100% perfect and no foreign adversary will gain access? BS. Either we need to ban it completely for all manufacturers, or we don't actually care.
Last I checked everything is logged in the USA. If you want to make a data play in the USA, why wouldn't you log and sell everything? IIRC, the Subaru US EULA even included intimate activity.
There is no such thing as EU defence - EU states have their own forces. The main defensive alliance in Europe is NATO, and the most important NATO country is the US.
I would be more terrified if they didn’t spare a manufacturer who designs and makes cars in Sweden and the US since decades just because the majority owner is Chinese.
I don't think Polestar should be banned, nor any other Chinese car maker for that matter, but I can understand why Volvo gets a different treatment.
Volvo probably employs several 1000s of people throughout the US from decades of dealerships, workshops, second hand sales etc, and they have a relatively large factory in the US.
Polestar OTOH has no factories and use direct-sales instead of going through dealerships.
So it's likely that Volvo generates a lot more value inside the US than they extract, while Polestar probably doesn't.
If you go to China you will see plenty of KFC, Starbucks, Apple, and Tesla. American companies that all make billions out of the Chinese market.
Yet the US government seems happy to play games like this; there must be someone thinking - hey the shoe could soon be on the other foot? Maybe we should cool it a bit ...
Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's very difficult for US or Western companies in general to do business in China without opaque restrictions, corruptions, and share ownership hoops. If the US is playing games, then it's closer to kids playing soccer on weekends; China is already in the pro leagues.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...
Polestar is predominantly Chinese-owned. Federal Connected Car Rules instituted a ban on the company selling cars in the United States.
I don't see any of those on the mozillafoundation page, per @andsoitis.
It is silly to credulously pretend that the excuse about Chinese software has even a whiff of legitimacy.
(Though I thought that anybody as smart as you think you are would've inferred that without issue)
So while I didn’t quite follow that reference, it’s true that if Trump were to ban them for simply being owned by China, then he’d be kind of screwed because he’d then have to ban all his own merch like the Trump phone and his made-in-China MAGA hats.
Disregard this parent's bias.
As I mentioned above, it's not fringe to ban Chinese hardware for security concerns. They've been surreptitiously planting undisclosed control equipment. [0] No company would knowingly add more costs and complexity for nothing in return. And if the Chinese maker didn't know about the trojan tech, then it's even more concerning.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
You might want to re-evaluate your political bias.
There is precedent. And it's not just the US that's concerned about Chinese stealth tech.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/774024/volvo-software-ex90-fixes/
It's all just this lawless personal fealty shit.
Are the people who don't like it going to withdraw those powers the next time they have the opportunity? The main alternative is more of this.
But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.
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’.
"Ford imported all of its first-generation Ford Transit Connect models as "passenger vehicles" by including rear windows, rear seats, and rear seat belts.[1] The vehicles were exported from Turkey on ships owned by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), arrived in Baltimore, and were converted back into light trucks at WWL's Vehicle Services Americas, Inc. facility by replacing rear windows with metal panels and removing the rear seats and seat belts.[1] The removed parts were not shipped back to Turkey for reuse, but shredded and recycled in Ohio.[1] The process exploited the loophole in the customs definition of a light truck; as cargo does not need seats with seat belts or rear windows, presence of those items automatically qualified the vehicle as a "passenger vehicle" and exempted the vehicle from "light truck" status. The process cost Ford hundreds of dollars per van, but saved thousands in taxes.[1]"
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.
But politicians can never resist exceptions and carve outs and then the game starts again
Isn't that just going to further advantage multinational corporations that don't have to move currency in order to move resources because they're all within the same corporation?
Otherwise if you make everything in China and sell it in the US you'll eventually have to transfer USD from your US operation to your Chinese operation to pay suppliers, labour, taxes etc.
But eventually you do have to pay the workers and taxes in China in yuan, and ultimately that money comes from the US consumer, making some kind of US capital account transaction inevitable?
Maybe I'm missing something but I think it does work because ultimately a current account deficit mathematicaly has to be exactly balanced with a capital account surplus. You can attack the current account side with tariffs, but it's actually more elegant to attack the capital account surplus instead
The Volvo distinction is ... I mean maybe the Volvo software stack is in Europe or the US. Maybe it's also in China!
I do not really subscribe to this philosophy but what's going on isn't a "Polestar would be tar riffed" thing. It's an outright "you can't sell em" thing
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be that.
It's a perfectly valid concern, obviously. However in the current context of a blatantly corrupted government this might be a squeeze for money or just something done out of spite.
Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678494
I'm not saying "trust the government", not at all. But meddling in China trade is absolutely not meddling with the free market.
Ideally what you would want is to get China to stop doing that, but now propose a mechanism to get them to.
China subsidizes (among other things) battery manufacturing, which is the biggest single cost for making EVs. If you get your batteries cheaper than competing companies then you can make premium cars with an electric range at the high end of the market and then use the subsidized cost to provide other amenities that cause customers to choose your product over alternatives even at a premium price. It allows you to take the high end of the market on value just as well as the low end on cost.
because trade balances are established by free markets, but China doesn't allow many of our goods and does not allow free market competition. Also "strategic dumping" to establish supremacy in markets which can later be exploited.
also, "free market" does not have anything close to a precise meaning; i used it because you used it but it's highly ambiguous, better to rephrase sentences to accurately include the phrase "market clearing price" while identifying external strictures which might move the market clearing price away from where it should be.
Maybe Volvo still does and it's a mystery why they can still sell here. Maybe Volvo doesn't and there is no story here.
But if the car talks to China and gets updates from China, the US doesn't care if it's built here.
The onus is on the commentator to substantiate his claims of there being a rationale.
It is from the Biden era too, nothing to do with "this administration". Just common sense governing.
Software these days is distributed and globalized in virtually every sense. Polestar is headquartered in Sweden and much of their software development is in the UK.
The devs, in the UK or not, will do what it tells them to do.
The question isn't "why ban Polestar", it is "why ban Polestar without banning Volvo". They are both headquartered in Sweden, they are both owned by the same conglomerate, and they are often even both manufactured in the same factories. So what makes them different enough to warrant banning only one of them?
It appears to be a general ban on "connected vehicles" controlled from certain countries even if built in the US[1], so I would guess that Volvo does not meet the criteria for that.
1. https://www.topgear.com/car-news/usa/polestar-has-been-banne...
If we have problems with consumer-hostile behaviour like tracking users, remotely disabling vehicles, or other things like that we should outlaw those behaviours in products used in the US.
We will never do that because Western auto manufacturers want to be able to behave badly in the same way Chinese manufacturers might and they have a firm grasp on the American governments leash.
'Its from China' is a dumb reason not to allow a product into the market. If there are specific features, standards, etc that should be followed, enforce those.
"its from China" is a good reason for many countries. A lot of countries are currently worried about their dependence on the US. They would have a lot more to worry about if they were dependent on China. Is it a good idea for European countries to put themselves in a position where China could disable half the vehicles in their country? The same for every Asian country that might have a dispute with China. Just borrowing money from China has proved to be a disaster for some Asian countries even without a dispute.
Why is it that when we deal with China it's acceptable not to trust the vendor but when we buy from literally anyone else we have to accept the enormous number of backdoors and implicit spying that comes with it?
China isn't the problem. The perverse incentives created when we don't own our own gear is.
Yes, dream on. How are you going to politically push through something very few people even understand? I covered this is in the first line of my comment.
> Why is it that when we deal with China it's acceptable not to trust the vendor but when we buy from literally anyone else we have to accept the enormous number of backdoors and implicit spying that comes with it?
You have to accept it from someone. You seem to have missed my point that for many people (and countries) trusting Chinese vendors is worse than trusting the alternatives.
A junior engineer on the x-500 future fighter jet drives a polestar and seems to be visiting the house of a single woman (which they know from tiktok days) while his family would probably think he would be at work. Will this guy throw away his family or start handing over USB keys?
Any even mildly intelligent politician is going to try and block this ability.
How many domestic automotive manufacturers does America have, and how many times has the current administration threatened annexation of their Northern "ally"?
This is, at best, hypocrisy; and being on the recieving end of the annexation threats, I'm disinclined to use the most generous interpretation of America's "Rules for me but not for thee" attitude
Countries have been spying on each other (and their citizens) for centuries. Its not hypocrisy so much as run of the mill geopolitics.
Also, this rule is from the Biden administration, not Trump.
Don't double the problem before you try to fix it.
But yeah this thing is likely more protectionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Expeditionary_Force
Volvo probably employs several 1000s of people throughout the US from decades of dealerships, workshops, second hand sales etc, and they have a relatively large factory in the US.
Polestar OTOH has no factories and use direct-sales instead of going through dealerships.
So it's likely that Volvo generates a lot more value inside the US than they extract, while Polestar probably doesn't.
Yet the US government seems happy to play games like this; there must be someone thinking - hey the shoe could soon be on the other foot? Maybe we should cool it a bit ...
Same goes for Thinkpad/Motorola, but I guess there at could argue these are not original Chinese brands.
Uh, about that.. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-416839A1.pdf