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Comment by queenkjuul | Hacker News Reader

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

I don't think Polestar should be banned, nor any other Chinese car maker for that matter, but I can understand why Volvo gets a different treatment.

Volvo probably employs several 1000s of people throughout the US from decades of dealerships, workshops, second hand sales etc, and they have a relatively large factory in the US.

Polestar OTOH has no factories and use direct-sales instead of going through dealerships.

So it's likely that Volvo generates a lot more value inside the US than they extract, while Polestar probably doesn't.

The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.

>The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.

Not sure what you mean here but I suspect we're talking about different things. Payroll is obviously value created by the business that's directly given to the society where the business operates, and it's not uncommon that it's higher than the company profits.

Take Amazon for example, payroll costs are much higher than the profits.

Car companies also create a secondary maintenance and repair business, insurance and financing business, resale business and so on that generate more value in the country they operate as well.

So I find it likely that a well established car brand like Volvo generates more money that stays in the US than they generate money that is extracted out from the US.

And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted. While there is some modest surplus I hope people get from their job (e.g. they'd do the same job for less money), that surplus of excess wages over what people would accept will be lower than consumer surplus for almost any standard business.

>And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted

That counts the value twice though. The value of the labour is precisely the payroll and the profits so it's accounted for.

Edit: So simply put, Volvo (or any other co with a factory in the US) operates a business that generates a lot of payroll and some profits, and the payroll remains in the US.

You're touching on what is probably the real reason. Volvo has an extensive dealer network in the US, and dealers are traditionally involved in the political process (i.e. they lobby extensively). Also Volvos enjoy a decent market share and brand recognition. Polestar on the other hand only sold in single digit thousands in the past couple of years and are definitely not as well known. There's not a lot of difference otherwise, Polestar 3 is 95% identical to Volvo EX90 and they're both manufactured at Volvo's South Carolina plant mainly from Chinese parts. Polestar 4 is indeed diferent, based on Zeeker 001 and manufactured in South Korea. Anyways, my guess is Polestar didn't jump through the hoops and didn't grease the right wheels, probably because it was not worth the trouble for what is about 5-6% of their global market share

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