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.
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’.
"Ford imported all of its first-generation Ford Transit Connect models as "passenger vehicles" by including rear windows, rear seats, and rear seat belts.[1] The vehicles were exported from Turkey on ships owned by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), arrived in Baltimore, and were converted back into light trucks at WWL's Vehicle Services Americas, Inc. facility by replacing rear windows with metal panels and removing the rear seats and seat belts.[1] The removed parts were not shipped back to Turkey for reuse, but shredded and recycled in Ohio.[1] The process exploited the loophole in the customs definition of a light truck; as cargo does not need seats with seat belts or rear windows, presence of those items automatically qualified the vehicle as a "passenger vehicle" and exempted the vehicle from "light truck" status. The process cost Ford hundreds of dollars per van, but saved thousands in taxes.[1]"
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.
Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.
It's all just this lawless personal fealty shit.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...
Polestar is predominantly Chinese-owned. Federal Connected Car Rules instituted a ban on the company selling cars in the United States.
It is silly to credulously pretend that the excuse about Chinese software has even a whiff of legitimacy.
I'm not saying "trust the government", not at all. But meddling in China trade is absolutely not meddling with the free market.
Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump
Once upon a time nations understood the issues better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_switches
Cheap good for decades has meant companies have been able to depress wages to the point no one can really live without them. Removing the cheap goods without also giving up massive corporate profits would just mean most people collapse into poverty.
They just want to ban even more things.
(Though I thought that anybody as smart as you think you are would've inferred that without issue)
I don't see any of those on the mozillafoundation page, per @andsoitis.