Do you have an official announcement this is the case or are you just making excuses for this administration?

Honest question: what would prevent the CCP from buying telemetry on the open data market via intermediaries, from cars that were made in the USA?

But having my Tesla made in Europe phone the US is totally fine right?

This is a remarkable opinion.

If we have problems with consumer-hostile behaviour like tracking users, remotely disabling vehicles, or other things like that we should outlaw those behaviours in products used in the US.

We will never do that because Western auto manufacturers want to be able to behave badly in the same way Chinese manufacturers might and they have a firm grasp on the American governments leash.

'Its from China' is a dumb reason not to allow a product into the market. If there are specific features, standards, etc that should be followed, enforce those.

What does it even mean to "get updates from China"?

Software these days is distributed and globalized in virtually every sense. Polestar is headquartered in Sweden and much of their software development is in the UK.

The audacity of the USA to do this to the entire world but banning anything foreign that does it to them.

Well but they were one of the lucky ones not living in terror for all the days past. Truly lucky, no irony here.

Read up on the "chicken tax" for how long the auto industry has navigated weird assemvly games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

Reminds me of this.

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 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

Volvo also has BEVs, which are rebadged Zeekr (Geely) and mainly sold in China.

Or maybe somebody at the decision table had sentimental feelings for Volvo. Like Kyoto.

Polestar designs cars in Sweden and builds then in the US for many years, it's still strange

Are they going to also ban Jaguar and Land Rover because they're owned by an Indian company?

Corruption and transparency are polar opposites

Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. It's very difficult for US or Western companies in general to do business in China without opaque restrictions, corruptions, and share ownership hoops. If the US is playing games, then it's closer to kids playing soccer on weekends; China is already in the pro leagues.

Anyway - the answer to the rhetorical question - is there anyone thinking "it could be our turn soon" - seems to be a resounding "no".

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.

That depends on which Volvo you’re talking about.

Maybe Volvo has some Swedish brand advertising running on Fox news?

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.

At least you have the R2 now!

Everytime the issue of Chinese state subsidies comes up, two things occur to me.

First, a "subsidy" is just govt tax money. In other words it comes from somewhere. It is, in effect, the Chinese people, contributing to the creation, or development of an industry. Clearly the Chinese govt thinks this is a sound commercial strategy, and certainly from here (considering their global dominance in manufacturing) it appears to be working.

Secondly, it's not like all countries don't subsidize industries of their own. Although their decisions of what to subsidy varys a lot.

For example the US subsidizes weapons production. To the tune of a trillion $ a year. That spills over a bit into commercial stuff (Boeing for example.) And sure, there is some export value (although that may decline in the long term given current political isolationism.)

Of course you can't spend a trillion a year if the storehouse is full. It's necessary to expend some munitions from time to time to make room for new ones. But I digress.

To go back, when people complain that US products are expensive because of Chinese (or other) subsidies- just be aware that the US subsidizes more than most. They just target industries that have little to no economic value to US citizens, and which can't be purchased by domestic or indeed foreign citizens.

The US could easily subsidize electric cars, or solar, or wind manufacturing but it chooses to subsidize airplanes and naval ships and tank builders instead. It chooses to spend money on 2 million employees (armed forces) rather than on 2 million factory workers, or day-care facilitators, or health-care workers.

> 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

Do you think other countries do not subsidize their own automakers? What about the US government bailing out the entire US auto-industry during the GFC? To this day the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan and has given this company many tax breaks for the last 30 years or so just to keep some of the production in France.

It's too easy to dunk on China when the rest of the world has been doing the same exact thing for god knows how long but nobody had a problem with that as long as the EU/US auto-makers were making money hand over fist. Now, that it is changing, all of sudden everyone is screaming that China is the devil when it basically follows the same exact playbook.

As for free market argument, it is arguably harder to compete as a Chinese company in China given the cut-throat competition happening now than in the west and contrary to most of the western governments who would be too scared to let Ford or Renault fail for example, the Chinese government is very happy to see that some of its auto companies are failing because it means that the remaining ones are performing much better and have to keep innovating to succeed.

That is why the Chinese automakers are steamrolling the competition at the moment, they give people what they want: innovative products at a fair price point.

As it's been said many times in the past, don't hate the player, hate the game.

How is preventing a Chinese brand from selling here not meddling in the free market?

The spread of totalitarianism as, perhaps, exemplified by the US government arbitrarily deciding that certain cars can't be sold in the US, even if they're manufactured in the US and meet all applicable regulations?

Totalitarianism on the rise in the global hegemon doesn't terrify you?

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.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...

Huh? Polestar and Volvo’s electric models share a very large part of their software stack, see [1]. I’ve seen forum posts talking about where the service centre accidentally loaded the Volvo software onto a Polestar. There is really quite a lot shared between the vehicles of these two companies.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/774024/volvo-software-ex90-fixes/

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.