Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo. That Should Terrify You

SilverElfin

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.

andsoitis

It does not terrify me.

jleyank

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?

jauntywundrkind

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.

elzbardico

Probably the stupid politician behind it didn't get the memo that Volvo is no longer a swedish company?

jfengel

If you waited until today to get terrified... Then I guess you're one of today's unlucky 10,000. Congratulations, or something.

catigula

Why would we let China pump and dump our economy with cheap goods? We already tried that and it didn’t work.

AnotherGoodName

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’.

trhway

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.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678494

fsckboy

> 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.

Eufrat

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.

WarmWash

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.

Kon5ole

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.

chvid

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 ...