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.
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.
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.
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.
They need to balance between the Silicon Valley oligarchs desires and the MAGA voters possible reactions. Banning Volvo would probably not be well received by MAGA, at least Trump would need a bit more time to build the case that these vehicles are now unreliable.
Having spent some time in California and seen things town by town at a very granular level, I think woke voters are the ones driving Volvos.
So while I didn’t quite follow that reference, it’s true that if Trump were to ban them for simply being owned by China, then he’d be kind of screwed because he’d then have to ban all his own merch like the Trump phone and his made-in-China MAGA hats.
As I mentioned above, it's not fringe to ban Chinese hardware for security concerns. They've been surreptitiously planting undisclosed control equipment. [0] No company would knowingly add more costs and complexity for nothing in return. And if the Chinese maker didn't know about the trojan tech, then it's even more concerning.
To be precise: Biden created an abusable system that requires waivers for Chinese software that is now being administered by the GOP.
Volvo got a waiver from the Trump admin no problem. Polestar could not get their waiver from the Trump admin.
I expect Polestar will eventually get their waiver, once Elon has less clout. Until then, Elon has tariffs keeping china-made EVs uncompetitive, and this program that deals with Chinese companies that setup shop in America.
