Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule

Even if there is proof the government will not enforce tariffs on Tesla and if the courts compel them they will just change it to exclude Tesla.

Interesting, does the proportion by weight, size, value or count? eg a EV battery is 25% of the weight, 50% of the cost and 0.1% of the number of parts.

If the origins are so fuzzy, I guess other manufacturers would very soon adjust their part lists/part origins to avoid the tariff?

This is political corruption, the rule was created for Musk because he is a political ally of the president. Why wasn't it 70% or 90%? Because the number was chosen to give Tesla an unfair advantage. So while your technical points are valid, they miss the big picture.

You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.

Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.

It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.

If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").

One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.

Trump is in no way a free market ideologue and has made that very clear. Or are you talking about Elon?

Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..

I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe

Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.

If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.

Same. This era has exposed them as the shameless hypocrites they are.

It's not just the idea in isolation though. I don't think anyone would complain much if the rule was "in N mths the threshold is X". Everyone could do the necessary adjustments and play by the same rules. But if the rule applies immediately, favours the guy who gave you millions, and impacts the competition financially where they need to make me investments to comply with the rules... yeah, that stinks even if it looks like a generic rule.

Just a coincidence that the only company that currently fits the criteria is Tesla then.

Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?

> where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".

The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.

The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.

This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.

It's different when I like the rules.

The key is the “…over a certain size” solely benefiting the richest man in the world, who just so happens to be heavily involved (despite no election) in the very government setting the policy and determining the size.

When you say EU rules, I guess it's the GDPR part on having the user data stay in the EU?

Otherwise I don't see any other rule that would ask the foreign company to move most of it's workforce and production capacity.

>If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.

To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?

Also, why is the Model S is stuck at 80%?

You can tweak the rules infinitely to get the outcome you want. It's suspiciously convenient how the only company that's exempt from those tariffs is owned by the guy that gave Trump $200+ millions during his campaign.

You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.

In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.

Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.

I would be surprised if Ford does anything drastic with their supply chain. Probably just wait this out. POTUS is going to be stripped of this ridiculous tariff "power" one way or another.

* Bogus emergency is up for review

* Congress discussing stripping power

* Constitutionality in question

* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up

> how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing?

It doesn’t. Trump is clearly trying to negotiate these tariffs away. So they don’t incentivise moving production. Just taxing everyone but Musk.

That was yesterday's narrative, keep up! Now tariffs were a plan to pressure our allies to renegotiate their trade deals with us in our favor, and that worked great! (According to the white house (Also forget that not a single deal was made)).

Oops! Scratch that, now that China won't back down on their retaliatory tariffs, they were always a tool to make China "fall back in line" or something. Yeah, destroying our own economy ought to teach them a lesson.

This shit is so transparent, I'm amazed as to how 30% of the country can still endorse this clown and his circus. My mental image of the average republican voter is now that of a toddler trying to fit a square into a circle hole while drooling on themselves.

>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened

They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.

But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.

This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.

Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.

Why aren't you assuming the opposite -- that these mythical levers don't actually exist?

> I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.

The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.

[flagged]

You're so wedded to your overly simplistic and conspiratorial worldview that everything is a secret plan by "the elites", that now you've had to invent a new conspiracy about how they all had a secret plan to lose themselves billions of dollars.

Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.

There seems to be a (largely American) misconception that people in positions of power are there because they earned such a position through being capable and competent.

Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.

It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.

It appears that the American Automobile Labeling Act measures domestic content on a value basis (that is, the amount the manufacturer pays the supplier for it):

https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...

Yes.