> Ford imported all of its first-generation Ford Transit Connect models as "passenger vehicles" by including rear windows, rear seats, and rear seat belts. The vehicles are exported from Turkey on ships owned by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (WWL), arrive in Baltimore, and are 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. The removed parts are not shipped back to Turkey for reuse, but shredded and recycled in Ohio. The process exploits 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 qualifies the vehicle as a "passenger vehicle" and exempts the vehicle from "light truck" status. The process costs Ford hundreds of dollars per van, but saves thousands in taxes. U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimated that between 2002 and 2018 the practice saved Ford $250 million in tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax#Circumventing_the_...
I'm assuming it's cheaper/easier to sell light trucks than passenger vehicles in the US. (I'm aware of the difference in emission regulations)
https://radiolab.org/podcast/177199-mutant-rights
Little blurb
…who noticed something interesting while looking at a book of tariff classifications. "Dolls," which represent human beings, are taxed at almost twice the rate of "toys," which represent something not human - such as robots, monsters, or demons. As soon as they read that, Sherry and Indie saw dollar signs. it just so happened that one of their clients, Marvel Comics, was importing its action figures as dolls.
…
So Sherry and Indie went down to the customs office with a bag of XMEN action figures to convince the US government that these mutants are NOT human.Are we going to get a Troy Miller origin story? Bit by an improperly declared radioactive package, he dedicated his life to defending our borders from the Guild of Calamitous Import.
This legit made me ill and the people responsible for it, the people who permitted it, and the executives who oversaw it should all be in prison.
These seats could have been sold as spares, conversion kits, even put into other new cars.
I think this behaviour should be criminalised and I'm not taking about the tax evasion.
Taxes are pretty arbitrary. Unless you intend to enforce the spirit rather than the letter of the law you're always going to be playing cat and mouse games. People who generate money want to keep it and people who give away money want to take it from people who have money. One will ALWAYS be a step ahead of the other.
If you enforce the spirit of the law people call foul and stop playing the game with you.
Don't get mad at the mice, just build better mouse traps.
In prison for what crime? Perhaps feel sick about those writing the laws, instead of those who are following them?
To put it another way, I believe that you should be even more appalled at the waste that the customs duties would have imposed.
I can't really frame this as a global criticism either, the system has clearly evolved around the fact that importers of cheap overseas goods are constantly trying to game the rules to pay lower tariffs than competitors (see Ford with the Transit Connect).
The most frustrating part is political, and two parts:
* US politics have destabilized so much in the last decade that the rules are constantly changing, exceptions being granted and taken away, etc. This has dramatically increased the amount of brain share devoted to tariff engineering rather than product engineering.
* The tariff exclusion process (especially the recent Section 301 tariffs) is heavily lobbyist based. Small players are basically crushed while larger competitors are granted exclusions.
Multiplying, too
Worked out perfectly for us because our children were young, we lived at the beach, and driving them to school on the freeway was an absolute blast.
It really doesn't pass the sniff test, because insurers don't need to know how many seats a car has to determine whether or not a vehicle is a sports car. The make and model is sufficient to determine this. Insurers already have a list of all known mass produced vehicles and their attributes.
Also, most insurers don't rate "sports cars" as more expensive than other cars, outright, because sports cars are not overall actually riskier to insure than non-sports cars. The risk of the driver matters quite a bit more than the car. If you look at IIHS loss data, you'll find that cheap vehicles marketed to subprime markets often have higher liability loss rates than untrendy sports cars marketed to old men.
e.g. Late model Porsche 911s and Corvettes have long topped the least risky in terms of property damage liability according to IIHS data. Why? My guess is that the only people buying these vehicles new are rich old dudes who drive them carefully on Sundays and pay attention while doing so. But despite also being a similarly powerful car, the Dodge Charger Hellcat is one of the most risky. But it appeals to a very different crowd.
In my defense, I attributed it to the dealer instead of stating it as undisputed fact because it has always sounded a little funky to me. On the other hand, the seat is so small there isn’t any obvious reason for its existence.
The subject was interesting to me but not interesting enough to pursue it much further because I was going to get the car anyway.
Sweetly naive
Saves a bunch of money, so I'm not sure why any (imported) shoes are sold without fuzzy soles.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-p...
[0] https://ocdn.eu/pulscms-transforms/1/QCvk9kpTURBXy83N2RiNjQ1...
We need more of this kind of thinking from governments instead of just layering more and more paperwork on top of existing paperwork!
https://www.columbia.com/p/womens-pfg-tamiami-ii-short-sleev...
which has two small pockets on the side but it seems above the waist.
they describe them as "Two zip pockets on the side seams secure small items like keys, hair ties, and lip balm."
I think the original line mentioned in OP is completely gone and now we are on the Tamiami II style atm.
Note that the article discusses that these are not loopholes in the sense of weird unexpected hacks, but that the original exceptions were intentionally written in response to lobbying by manufacturers betting that they can offset their lobbying costs by the associated reduction in tariffs.
Orthogonally, though, even if these were loopholes that manufacturers were wriggling through against lawmakers' intentions, then (1) I think that there is no such thing as a law that is written so that it has literally no loopholes—even to make the claim, you'd have to define what a "loophole" is, which would probably require first require a precise definition of what the intent of the law is, at which point that would be the law and any work-arounds would be not loopholes, by definition—and (2) more or less because of (1), these things are still enforced by humans; as redpanda notes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594968), one of Ford's attempts at such skulduggery was successfully stopped by a DOJ lawsuit.