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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Polestar, the electric vehicle company backed by Volvo of Sweden and Leonardo DiCaprio was valued at $20 billion in a SPAC deal that will take it public.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anker/Ugreen, Shokz, Insta360, RoboRock, League of Legends, Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail, Lenovo, TikTok, Shein, Temu.
> If you go to the US, you will see Chinese brands nowhere.
You'll see the above very commonly in people's homes and on people's phones in the US. You're making the mistake of limiting your view to "retail businesses on the street" when those have been going out of fashion in the first place. All of the above are brands that are commonly seen in the US and a lot of people (especially those under 30) are familiar with.
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.
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.
Honestly, I think that ship has sailed, most users don't want the vents visible at all anymore, and that means no little tabs. I agree it's a bummer, but it's like 400th on my ranked priority list of things to care about when buying a car.
Granted, it seems inconsistent to treat Volvo different from Polestar. It might be just, that Volvo will get the Axe in a separate process, it might be sheer incompetence of the US admin, or it might be a deliberate negotiation tactic.
But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market.
This is not to take from the accomplishments of the Chinese, but a major part of the last 30+ years of development is just massive screwing and exploiting the western open market and its companies. Yeah, we’ve not forgotten the droves of people blatantly stealing IP on every trade show imaginable and a state completely absent from enforcing IP when ever another Chinese car is dropped to the market that looks 100% like a Benz, Porsche or Land Rover.
Everytime the issue of Chinese state subsidies comes up, two things occur to me.
First, a "subsidy" is just govt tax money. In other words it comes from somewhere. It is, in effect, the Chinese people, contributing to the creation, or development of an industry. Clearly the Chinese govt thinks this is a sound commercial strategy, and certainly from here (considering their global dominance in manufacturing) it appears to be working.
Secondly, it's not like all countries don't subsidize industries of their own. Although their decisions of what to subsidy varys a lot.
For example the US subsidizes weapons production. To the tune of a trillion $ a year. That spills over a bit into commercial stuff (Boeing for example.) And sure, there is some export value (although that may decline in the long term given current political isolationism.)
Of course you can't spend a trillion a year if the storehouse is full. It's necessary to expend some munitions from time to time to make room for new ones. But I digress.
To go back, when people complain that US products are expensive because of Chinese (or other) subsidies- just be aware that the US subsidizes more than most. They just target industries that have little to no economic value to US citizens, and which can't be purchased by domestic or indeed foreign citizens.
The US could easily subsidize electric cars, or solar, or wind manufacturing but it chooses to subsidize airplanes and naval ships and tank builders instead. It chooses to spend money on 2 million employees (armed forces) rather than on 2 million factory workers, or day-care facilitators, or health-care workers.
Correct. Almost every country subsidizes domestic industry. Just off the top of my head: Boeing, Farm subsidies, CHIPS act (approx
52B), Oil drilling, GM & Chrysler bailouts, Airline bailouts, State tax breaks for Amazon, etc
> But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market
Do you think other countries do not subsidize their own automakers? What about the US government bailing out the entire US auto-industry during the GFC? To this day the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan and has given this company many tax breaks for the last 30 years or so just to keep some of the production in France.
It's too easy to dunk on China when the rest of the world has been doing the same exact thing for god knows how long but nobody had a problem with that as long as the EU/US auto-makers were making money hand over fist. Now, that it is changing, all of sudden everyone is screaming that China is the devil when it basically follows the same exact playbook.
As for free market argument, it is arguably harder to compete as a Chinese company in China given the cut-throat competition happening now than in the west and contrary to most of the western governments who would be too scared to let Ford or Renault fail for example, the Chinese government is very happy to see that some of its auto companies are failing because it means that the remaining ones are performing much better and have to keep innovating to succeed.
That is why the Chinese automakers are steamrolling the competition at the moment, they give people what they want: innovative products at a fair price point.
As it's been said many times in the past, don't hate the player, hate the 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.
Terrify me? Really? There are other, genuinely terrifying things happening right now: climate change, human rights violations, animal rights, the spread of totalitarianism… that’s terrifying.
The spread of totalitarianism as, perhaps, exemplified by the US government arbitrarily deciding that certain cars can't be sold in the US, even if they're manufactured in the US and meet all applicable regulations?
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.
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.
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.
The entire article doesn't once stipulate that the grounds for banning a Chinese owned car is having telemetry that phones home to China.
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.
Do you have an official announcement this is the case or are you just making excuses for this administration?
https://www.bis.gov/connected-vehicles
It is from the Biden era too, nothing to do with "this administration". Just common sense governing.
He's just saying the article does not even discuss this vital distinction, let alone bring evidence either way.
It's impossible to prove the nonexistance and mentioning hearsay wouldn't be good.
The onus is on the commentator to substantiate his claims of there being a rationale.
Well, that is not true. The 'nonexistance' part. All new car phone home, and that is somewhere on the world.
Ironic coming from the country with three domestic OEMs, and routinely threatens economic annexation of my country
It also doesn't discuss if the polestar was made of asbestos or if it was dangerous to unicorn spawning habitat.
Honest question: what would prevent the CCP from buying telemetry on the open data market via intermediaries, from cars that were made in the USA?
Nothing but there they don't get to pick and choose what they want to log.
But yeah this thing is likely more protectionism.
But having my Tesla made in Europe phone the US is totally fine right?
It's crazy to me there hasn't been a backlash against that yet
.... but having all of EU defense including F35s calling in home in Trump US before every mission is totally fine right?
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.
This is a remarkable opinion.
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.
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
You don't have to buy any American products, and can vote for politicians that want to ban American access to Canadian markets.
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.
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?
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.
It means that Polestar's ultimate owner is a state-aligned Chinese conglomerate.
The devs, in the UK or not, will do what it tells them to do.
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.
1. https://www.topgear.com/car-news/usa/polestar-has-been-banne...
My Polestar has the word "Volvo" on several parts. They share a software stack and get the same updates.
Who deploys and controls it? Do they operate separately, use the same servers etc.
There are no concrete guidelines or rules as this article illustrates.
The audacity of the USA to do this to the entire world but banning anything foreign that does it to them.
If you waited until today to get terrified... Then I guess you're one of today's unlucky 10,000. Congratulations, or something.
Well but they were one of the lucky ones not living in terror for all the days past. Truly lucky, no irony here.
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’.
Read up on the "chicken tax" for how long the auto industry has navigated weird assemvly games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
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]"
Ford ended up paying $365 million (roughly $2200 per van) to settle a lawsuit from the government over that.
I wonder if manufacturers are using LLMs to find all the dumb loopholes in the laws that they can.
If the law was that simple, we wouldn't need the rest of the judicial system.
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.
Radiolab[0] had a story about this involving "toys" vs "dolls".
[0] https://radiolab.org/podcast/177199-mutant-rightsThe solution is to tax the capital account instead (tobin tax) or at the very least put the same tariff on everything.
But politicians can never resist exceptions and carve outs and then the game starts again
> 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
Putting the parts in the same box, in the US, may cost more than the tariff for the whole thing being built in China or India.
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...
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.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be that.
It could be that US would benefit from having a more generic GDPR law rather than individual enforcement.
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.
Some history for context:
In 1999 Swedish Volvo spins out and sells Volvo Cars to Ford (Volvo Sweden continues making trucks and heavy equipment) for 6.45 B USD.
In 2010 Ford sells Volvo Cars to Geely for 1.8 B USD.
iN 2017 Geely spins out Polestar from Volvo Cars. In 2021 Geely IPOes Polestar at NYSE for 20 B USD.
Leonardo DiCaprio-Backed Electric Automaker Polestar Valued At $20 Billion In SPAC Deal
https://deadline.com/2021/09/leonardo-dicaprio-backed-electr...
Polestar, the electric vehicle company backed by Volvo of Sweden and Leonardo DiCaprio was valued at $20 billion in a SPAC deal that will take it public.
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.
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?
Volvo also has BEVs, which are rebadged Zeekr (Geely) and mainly sold in China.
To be clear - most of Volvo's BEVs are their own designs, including all currently for sale in the US.
Volvo’s EX line of EVs is sold here in the U.S.
Or maybe somebody at the decision table had sentimental feelings for Volvo. Like Kyoto.
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.
Polestar designs cars in Sweden and builds then in the US for many years, it's still strange
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.
The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.
Are they going to also ban Jaguar and Land Rover because they're owned by an Indian company?
Related:
Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678494
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.
Corruption and transparency are polar opposites
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.
The simple story is: If you go to China you will see US brands everywhere. If you go to the US, you will see Chinese brands nowhere.
Anker/Ugreen, Shokz, Insta360, RoboRock, League of Legends, Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail, Lenovo, TikTok, Shein, Temu.
> If you go to the US, you will see Chinese brands nowhere.
You'll see the above very commonly in people's homes and on people's phones in the US. You're making the mistake of limiting your view to "retail businesses on the street" when those have been going out of fashion in the first place. All of the above are brands that are commonly seen in the US and a lot of people (especially those under 30) are familiar with.
Really, you will see TCL (and Hisense) nowhere in US? I recommend visiting any store selling TVs.
Same goes for Thinkpad/Motorola, but I guess there at could argue these are not original Chinese brands.
Yes - really. The presence of US companies in China is huge and everywhere whereas the presence of Chinese companies in the US is tiny.
Also Tencent, GE, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Pictures, DJI, AMC Theaters…
> DJI
Uh, about that.. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-416839A1.pdf
Anyway - the answer to the rhetorical question - is there anyone thinking "it could be our turn soon" - seems to be a resounding "no".
Probably the stupid politician behind it didn't get the memo that Volvo is no longer a swedish company?
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.
That depends on which Volvo you’re talking about.
Maybe Volvo has some Swedish brand advertising running on Fox news?
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.
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.
The same kind of thinking was used on encryption algorithms in the 90s.
Only a few of us are big enough to fit an LLM on a tshirt
You could fit all of Mythos on a t-shirt in microfilm size. But washing a microfilm shirt would be tricky.
dammit, was planning on buying a Polestar at the end of this year when our Tesla lease runs out
At least you have the R2 now!
With screen operated motorized vents. Eww.
Same as the Polestar.
Honestly, I think that ship has sailed, most users don't want the vents visible at all anymore, and that means no little tabs. I agree it's a bummer, but it's like 400th on my ranked priority list of things to care about when buying a car.
Granted, it seems inconsistent to treat Volvo different from Polestar. It might be just, that Volvo will get the Axe in a separate process, it might be sheer incompetence of the US admin, or it might be a deliberate negotiation tactic.
But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market.
This is not to take from the accomplishments of the Chinese, but a major part of the last 30+ years of development is just massive screwing and exploiting the western open market and its companies. Yeah, we’ve not forgotten the droves of people blatantly stealing IP on every trade show imaginable and a state completely absent from enforcing IP when ever another Chinese car is dropped to the market that looks 100% like a Benz, Porsche or Land Rover.
Everytime the issue of Chinese state subsidies comes up, two things occur to me.
First, a "subsidy" is just govt tax money. In other words it comes from somewhere. It is, in effect, the Chinese people, contributing to the creation, or development of an industry. Clearly the Chinese govt thinks this is a sound commercial strategy, and certainly from here (considering their global dominance in manufacturing) it appears to be working.
Secondly, it's not like all countries don't subsidize industries of their own. Although their decisions of what to subsidy varys a lot.
For example the US subsidizes weapons production. To the tune of a trillion $ a year. That spills over a bit into commercial stuff (Boeing for example.) And sure, there is some export value (although that may decline in the long term given current political isolationism.)
Of course you can't spend a trillion a year if the storehouse is full. It's necessary to expend some munitions from time to time to make room for new ones. But I digress.
To go back, when people complain that US products are expensive because of Chinese (or other) subsidies- just be aware that the US subsidizes more than most. They just target industries that have little to no economic value to US citizens, and which can't be purchased by domestic or indeed foreign citizens.
The US could easily subsidize electric cars, or solar, or wind manufacturing but it chooses to subsidize airplanes and naval ships and tank builders instead. It chooses to spend money on 2 million employees (armed forces) rather than on 2 million factory workers, or day-care facilitators, or health-care workers.
Correct. Almost every country subsidizes domestic industry. Just off the top of my head: Boeing, Farm subsidies, CHIPS act (approx 52B), Oil drilling, GM & Chrysler bailouts, Airline bailouts, State tax breaks for Amazon, etc
The scale is not even remotely comparable though to what China does
> But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market
Do you think other countries do not subsidize their own automakers? What about the US government bailing out the entire US auto-industry during the GFC? To this day the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan and has given this company many tax breaks for the last 30 years or so just to keep some of the production in France.
It's too easy to dunk on China when the rest of the world has been doing the same exact thing for god knows how long but nobody had a problem with that as long as the EU/US auto-makers were making money hand over fist. Now, that it is changing, all of sudden everyone is screaming that China is the devil when it basically follows the same exact playbook.
As for free market argument, it is arguably harder to compete as a Chinese company in China given the cut-throat competition happening now than in the west and contrary to most of the western governments who would be too scared to let Ford or Renault fail for example, the Chinese government is very happy to see that some of its auto companies are failing because it means that the remaining ones are performing much better and have to keep innovating to succeed.
That is why the Chinese automakers are steamrolling the competition at the moment, they give people what they want: innovative products at a fair price point.
As it's been said many times in the past, don't hate the player, hate the game.
It does not terrify me.
>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.
How is preventing a Chinese brand from selling here not meddling in 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.
Have you seen Polestar's pricing? They're very much positioned as the premium EV option and their pricing is pretty much the opposite of dumping.
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.
You make it sound like the US doesn't massively subsidise entire markets and then try to force other countries to accept these market distortions.
Expecting other countries to do the right thing while not doing it yourself makes you a hypocrite, it doesn't change what the right thing is.
Terrify me? Really? There are other, genuinely terrifying things happening right now: climate change, human rights violations, animal rights, the spread of totalitarianism… that’s terrifying.
The spread of totalitarianism as, perhaps, exemplified by the US government arbitrarily deciding that certain cars can't be sold in the US, even if they're manufactured in the US and meet all applicable regulations?
Totalitarianism on the rise in the global hegemon doesn't terrify you?
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.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...
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.
All of them are Chinese owned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geely. Geely, Polestar, Volvo, Zeekr, Smart, Lotus. All the same group
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
I don't see any of those on the mozillafoundation page, per @andsoitis.
Oops, indeed
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.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/774024/volvo-software-ex90-fixes/
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.
"Silly? Pretend?"
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-...
Isn't this using Biden administration guidelines?
It's hard to parse this without concluding that you are perhaps unaware that Volvo is Chinese.
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.
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)