alt Hacker NewsFeds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
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If you waited until today to get terrified... Then I guess you're one of today's unlucky 10,000. Congratulations, or something.
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’.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Related:
Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
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.
Probably the stupid politician behind it didn't get the memo that Volvo is no longer a swedish company?
dammit, was planning on buying a Polestar at the end of this year when our Tesla lease runs out
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would we let China pump and dump our economy with cheap goods? We already tried that and it didn’t work.
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 ...
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.