You can no longer do that since 1st of Jan 2025. The BPM discount for company cars was removed.
Countries, including the EU, like to have 'low tariffs' and then have sneaky backdoor taxes or outright bans on US goods through things like milk quotas (Canada), 'biosecurity' (Australia) or EU courts issuing spurious fines on US companies (based on vague laws that only get enforced against US companies, like DMA).
You mean the milk quota on imports that (a) trump negotiated and (b) the us has never hit?
[1] https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
Also, remind me, when was the last time that the US actually complied with an unfavourable ruling from the trade panel?
It is a table of the current trade deficit against each country as a ratio.
DMA (and similarly, GDPR) are enforced in EU countries just as much. It's just that the US tends to have more gigantic tech companies that do shady things with user data. Apparently the US doesn't care, but the EU actually does, and so it enforces its laws.
I don’t necessarily disagree with all of the laws themselves (some are incompetent EU risk aversion, some are good protections) but given the massive never ending fines being applied in bad faith and constantly moving goalposts it is indeed a defacto tariff on US tech firms.
If you do not see the moral hazard in this, I don't know what else I can tell you. If the EU had a seriously competitive tech industry, many of these laws would have never been created, as the EU is not some moral believer in privacy (they fight against encryption domestically), they are just run-of-the-mill protectionists like all governments.
The DMA is a tax on the United States. Look no further than its enforcement and its text (highly targeted).
Sounds legit!
This makes me wonder if US companies complaining about the GDPR and DMA have any idea how many more laws EU companies have to comply with in addition to this. It's not easy.
If you ever tried reading GDPR or DMA... you will realize pretty quickly that there is little meaning in them.
I am totally unsure someone can prove a DMA violation. It's simpler with GDPR because a lot of concepts from it have been already somehow interpreted and agreed upon. But we do not have case law in EU, so I guess even known GDPR violations are often dubious.
When has the DMA been used against EU tech companies? Never.
Your comment also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the DMA and GDPR laws. Neither of them are objective laws, and they are applied subjectively without guidance.
Let me be very clear: the EU does not tell you how to comply with either the DMA or the GDPR, period. The law is extremely vague and does not prescribe how to comply in any way, shape or form.
It's not a "tax" on US companies, it's just that US companies don't bother to comply with the regulations that apply in the EU, and thus get fined.
There's a good argument that this is targeted. Why didn't this regulation affect SAP? Their market position gives them leverage over a massive number of companies.
>it's just that US companies don't bother to comply with the regulations that apply in the EU, and thus get fined.
It's not that they "don't bother", it's that they understand complying with the regulation to cost them more than the fine. In other words, the regulation itself is a sort of fine, or tax imposed by the EU, with a magnitude of roughly equal proportion to the fines it imposes.
> It's not that they "don't bother", it's that they understand complying with the regulation to cost them more than the fine.
This means that the fines are not high enough and don't fulfill their purpose. That's an argument for the thesis that the EU is handling fines of violators in a too lax fashion, not the opposite. This has also been the impression of many EU citizens, and it seems to be the reason why so many huge US corporations keep violating EU customer protection rules again and again.
But the reality is also that US companies that violated those rules basically have no EU competition because the EU has an abysmal market in certain tech domains. There simply are no viable EU equivalents to Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
You have the order wrong. The companies came first, then came the laws. So we might reverse this statement to: "countries with company X in them tend to develop their laws so that company X is in conformance with those laws". This latter statement seems likely enough to be true, and is exactly the point of order in this discussion.
>By the same token, I would be surprised if US companies habitually developed products that don't conform with US law.
It's called "growth hacking". Uber was quite famous for it. The only time you'd benefit from breaking the law in a foreign country vs. your own country is if you intend to exit the market of that country; you don't have to worry about paying fines if the country can't reach you. If the intention is to continue doing business there, then any punishment will have to be borne just as if you were headquartered there.
>This means that the fines are not high enough and don't fulfill their purpose.
You're missing the point. The laws scale so that eventually they will be high enough that the company has to conform. The point I'm making is that a company's willingness to break a law shows that the law is costing them money, and we can even estimate how much money it costs them by the size of the fine. If we assume that all laws are fair and just then this just means that the company is evil. However, as we showed above, some laws are unjust, hence them costing a company money can be a way of unfairly extracting money from those companies.
Is it because it's an EU company and the DMA is a tax on the United States?
'The law that applies only to US companies is applied equally and fair!'
The EU wanted to fine Google $35,000,000,000 under DMA. That's a backdoor tax. No European tech company faces this scrutiny. Never have, never will -- because the DMA is a tax on the United States.
It's also interesting that the Google and Meta DMA fines are expected to land in the next week. What a timing coincidence, almost like it's retaliatory (as many articles have suggested).
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
You might say that's proof of it being unfair, but can you name a EU company which should be one? I can't really think of one, US companies are just so much bigger on the internet, even in the EU.
Looking at the other law you mentioned, GDPR, there are many EU companies receiving GDPR fines.
The law is written to arbitrarily tax US "gatekeepers" while explicitly excluding EU gatekeepers. Booking.com is another, also carved out.
That's the most backward way of trying to prove a point (without even addressing whether DMA and GDPR are a good thing or not, just based on that...)
Excuse me, this is not how a society should roll. Not a sustainable one at least.
In some places, dollar is not god. Important, but not god.
And no, that does not make any sense, and you're not missing anything. He believes this because he's a fucking idiot. He's aggressively racist, comically petty and thin-skinned, and overtly authoritarian, and as far as I can tell actively wants to permanently destroy American science and civil society out of spite, but he's also really, really, really dumb. In this case, he's managed to combine his powers to take a goal that's born out of racism and xenophobia and then implement it in the most idiotic way possible, and somehow the result is even worse than the sum of its components.
Model-S was about 85K excluding VAT (21%) for the plain version
Added tax incentives of 36% MIA
Added tax incentives of 28% KIA
Accelerated depreciation of 75% in the first year VAMIL
Free parking in the cities (normal hourly rate 5 - 7.50/hr)
More/better parking options
A free charger in front of your house regardless where (basically your private parking spot until maybe 4 years ago).
0 BPM tax (can be up to 40% of the price)
0 road tax (could be anywhere from 80-150 per month for type of car)
0 personal fiscal penalties of 25% of the new value of the car, including VAT (which would be a virtual 26K/year extra salary. At 51% tax that's about 1000 per month AFTER taxes)
The 85K car, including everything was cheaper to drive / own than a FREE car.
Almost all of that stopped in 2022, and what do you know? People stopped buying. THIS is politics. Setting policies which drive behavior.
The government "decides" what you will want to buy / drive / etc.
The point is exactly, that Americans are more than welcome to sell cars in the EU, if they can satisfy that.
It is not that Europeans categorically don't want to drive American cars.
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114272487006550281
On top of that they excluded services and only recognize goods for the calculation.
Car? max 4.5 + 21% VAT = 25%. But it simply doesn't matter bc we don't want their cars.. Except for thee Dodge RAM, which can be converted to a tax efficient company car (crazy)..
What amazes me even more is that Elon doesn't seems to understand it either.