alt Hacker Newsthe 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
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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.
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.