Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027

Quinner 47 points 23 comments June 25, 2026
arstechnica.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (7 comments)

qsxfthnkp2322

Surprised they were here in the first place since the USA needs to protect its own car industry. Sad because polestar seems genuinely good from the little I’ve seen about them.

wilkommen

Couldn't they have just mandated that Polestar cars in the US must not be able to connect to the internet? That would pretty much negate any potential foreign threat related to "connected cars". Just make them... not connected.

AlotOfReading

I think that these protectionist measures are ultimately going to hurt the competitiveness of the US auto industry. Exports and international sales are a big, but not overwhelming part of the revenue for major manufacturers. It's something like 20% of GM's revenue, and maybe 35% of Ford's. When they can't compete internationally, it's small enough that executives will convince themselves to focus on their core market in the US. That will in turn lead to production volumes (and hence economies of scale) slowly dropping. Vehicles from American brands are going to become even more unaffordable than they already are, At least we can hope that newer manufacturers like Slate and Rivian will keep things reasonable, and major foreign brands like Kia and Toyota might bring the fruits of their knowledge from competing internationally to their US models/factories. I'm not hopeful for the long term future of big three though, especially Stellantis and GM.

quantum_state

The US consumers are now becoming more and more like captive preys ... in the names of whatever special interest groups would make up ... so sad and outrageous!

bashtoni

Are they going to be banning Volvo too given they have the same parent company? It'll be interesting to see how far this protectionism goes.

JumpCrisscross

> the US Commerce Department has declined to authorize imports of new Polestars from model year 2027 onward as part of a rule banning connected cars from automakers with Chinese links Would the cars be allowed if connectivity were cut off? That could be a net win for consumers.

corymayfield

I'm not sure how this would even work as most cars have Chinese links in some form. Under this logic popular car brands that would be removed are Volvo, Polestar, Zeek, Lotus, MG, BYD, Smart, LDV, Chery, GWM, Jaecoo/Omoda, Leapmotor, Xpeng, etc - these are only off the top of my head. How would it even work with Tesla (America's golden child) - a large amount of their cars are built in China with strong links to the Chinese?

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
11,625 stories · 109,460 chunks indexed