China is using EV technology as a weapon against the West

‘The only real defence is to buy smart equipment from reliable sources’

‘Beijing could remotely stop electric cars manufactured in China on UK roads” sounds like the stuff of dystopian nightmares, but this is the real world in March 2024. MPs have been warned that EVs could be jammed remotely should UK-China relations deteriorate significantly.

But this shouldn’t come as a shock. Electric cars, for all the praise they may receive from politicians eager to burnish their green credentials, have become a sinister threat to the West.

Consider how, just last year, warnings were issued that Chinese tracking devices had been found embedded in the electronics of Downing Street vehicles. At the time, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, warned Chinese EVs could become the “next Huawei”.

It all felt like something you might expect to read in a Le Carré thriller updated for the digital age. If this story was a spy novel, the device would have been planted by a daring human mole within the government system. But this is the age of the internet of things (IoT), and yet more proof of what can be done simply by saturating your target country with products that contain a digital Trojan horse. This is now the signature weapon of the Chinese party state – industrial-scale cyber espionage capabilities weaponised through normal export trade.

And that means that we could all soon be in the firing line, not just early adopters in the EV revolution.

Smart technology, which is spreading rapidly through the brave new IoT, makes use of an interactive component called a “cellular IoT module” or CIM. These are currently used in all electric vehicles (EVs), but also in smart energy meters, some cameras, speaker and heating systems, and even doorbells.

The essence of CIMs is that they collect various types of data, according to the type of equipment they are installed in. They then share it with other parts of an internet-connected network, from which they in turn can receive data. Unless it is expressly disabled, CIMs are also continuously connected to their manufacturers, which may use them to conduct remote repairs and updates.

The risk from CIMs thus becomes obvious. Not only cyber attackers, but also the originators of the CIM can use it to gain access to the data from the device. A single compromised device somewhere in the wider network can also be used for cyber attacks on other parts of the network. The only real defence against this risk is to buy smart equipment from reliable sources which set out to protect security.

China, which is as usual ahead in this game of industrial-scale data collection by stealth, supplies more than 60pc of the world market for CIMs. There is a good chance that one of these may already be sitting in our homes or cars, potentially accessible by the Chinese state – what the UK Government euphemistically refers to as an “epoch-defining challenge to the international order”.

In democracies where privacy, civil liberties and freedom of speech are valued we tend to assume that adequate data protection legislation is in place to protect us. A Western EV manufacturer recently sacked employees who eavesdropped voice recordings and images retrieved remotely from a customer’s EV. But other EV producers are less scrupulous.

China has many thousands of data analysts using powerful supercomputer algorithms to home in on foreign intelligence and other exploitable information. No wonder the Downing Street security team were reportedly so rattled when the car yielded up its hostile capability.

Aside from its uniquely dangerous proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the greatest threat China poses is its capacity to weaponise data. Not only does information obtained from countless technical sources cover most conventional peacetime intelligence and targeting requirements, it also enables an enemy to gather immensely sensitive military secrets.

Civil societies will be the first victims of cyber warfare, so potentially disruptive that it could paralyse the workings of the state.

Since the time of Sunzi, Chinese strategists have aimed to win the war before the fighting starts. China has managed to work its digital way into more elements of UK critical national infrastructure than it is comfortable to contemplate. There are even softer and easier targets, alas.

As a motor industry expert warned last week, before long, unless we halt the influx of Chinese EVs, epochdefining challengers in Shanghai could literally press a few buttons and thousands of Chinese EVs on British motorways would slam on the brakes, causing carnage and utter paralysis of the road system.

There is still time to avoid this, and the Government must do what is needful.