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by HPsquared 1428 days ago
That's interesting. There must be other products with "odd features" for tax reasons. There was a case where Ford installed seats in a particular model of van so that it could be imported to the US as a passenger vehicle, but they removed the seats before selling. They ended up getting fined of course, but probably wouldn't have if they left the seats in and allowed the customers to remove them...
2 comments

Lots of products. Its called Tariff Engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_engineering.

Probably the best known example is Converse. "The felt lining on the bottom of the sneakers allows Converse to classify their product as slippers, so the company benefits from a much lower tariff rate." https://blogs.pugetsound.edu/econ/2019/02/18/tariff-engineer...

Similarly, to my understanding, some cameras are perfectly capable of taking video, but disable the feature altogether (or impose a 30-minute recording time limit) to be classified as a still camera rather than a video camera for tariff reasons.