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 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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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're banning Polestar cars that are designed in Sweden (I guess) and made in the US... because the car's Google firmware is Chinese-owned. This case isn't about saving jobs (that's what tariffs are for); it's a misguided attempt at privacy regulation.
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 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.
Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678494
But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.
It's all just this lawless personal fealty shit.
I'm not saying "trust the government", not at all. But meddling in China trade is absolutely not meddling with the free market.
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)
Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump
Once upon a time nations understood the issues better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_switches
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.
They just want to ban even more things.