Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat::The president ordered an investigation into auto technology that could track U.S. drivers, part of a broader effort to stop E.V. and other smart-car imports from China.
their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing
Cool. So let’s pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car “assembled” in the US doesn’t mean that your data isn’t being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.
China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn’t even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
The US is running scared because there is absolutely no way they can compete, unless they severely handicap the competition.
So, instead of free competition in Western markets, we have coddled American companies that are “too big to fail” that will continue producing obsolete technologies. If we haven’t already, we’ll start to see Boeing’s product issues in American cars.
Administration officials noted that American auto manufacturers that sold vehicles to customers in China were essentially forced by Chinese officials to use Chinese software in their vehicles.
I do question the amount of lifting the word essentially is doing in the above snippet, but that does sound like grounds to limit the inverse for Chinese imports
No need to question it. Western auto companies in China aren’t independent. They’re nearly always joint 50/50 ventures with Chinese auto companies and are under Chinese government regulation. I know for a fact that at least one American car company has the infotainment software for China written in China while all other regions use completely different software, written in NA.
Well, if the US spies on its own citizens can you imagine the shady shit they’d do on Chinese citizens?
I also wonder if restrictions on software are in response to the US restricting access to Huawei tech in allied nations. This shit is not new.
I also wouldn’t put it past US officials to inflate something for their own purposes - what if the Chinese requirement is for Chinese language software and it got turned around into Chinese software to serve an agenda.
This is one of the reasons the US is looking to restrict Chinese EV imports. And to be clear, they’re so cheap because the CCP is subsidizing the entire Chinese EV industry, since they want to entirely own the market. But that’s not all.
China, as you may know, has a lot of serious problems around privacy and surveillance. More pointedly: it’s a surveillance state. It’s entirely possible that Chinese EVs could be sending back tons of data to servers in China. That data could be related to users and passengers… but it could also be area surveillance and data gathering (i.e. effectively employing multiple cars in a particular area as a distributed integrated sensor system), because modern cars have a shitload of cameras and microphones in them these days. I would be extremely unsurprised if the CCP was leveraging EV data gathering as an intelligence source. Think about it: they could give/sell near-realtime information to anyone they feel like. The CCP themselves is interested, I’m sure, in what’s going on in Taipei right now. They might sell South Korean data to North Korea. They might sell Ukrainian or Moldovan or Latvian or Finnish data to Russia. Those states might then turn around and use that data to try to destabilize the specified target countries, or even to assist with an invasion.
There are a LOT of reasons why letting the CCP own a vast majority of global EV production is a bad idea.
Remember when the Patriot Act was a thing?
Surveillance of your citizens isn’t a CCP only thing.
Yeah. I know. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about this.
Whataboutism isn’t going to change what I said, or how accurate what I said is.
China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn’t even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
Whenever I see anyone comparing |absolute| values of anything between China and other countries, I just automatically assume they aren’t thinking very hard. You realize it’s a country of a billion and a half people right?
Okay so you’re saying the US doesn’t stand a chance.
India has a billion and a half people too by the way. Where are India’s EVs?
They may be on the way, since India is already the 4th biggest economy in the world and growing fast.
https://hbr.org/2023/09/is-india-the-worlds-next-great-economic-power
Okay so you’re saying the US doesn’t stand a chance.
Doesn’t stand a chance at what? Producing more cars than an industrialized country with 4x as many people? Yes I am. Would you say Canada “stands a chance” in that sense compared to the US?
The better question is: what benefit is a country getting for the stuff it makes and sells. GDP per capita is a useful measure because in theory it means every person is getting a larger slice of the country’s productive economic activity. Obviously reality is a lot more complex than that, but it’s certainly not helpful to be even more reductive and just ignore the population factor entirely.
Leave that to the customer to decide. Or is that not the point of the free market?
Not when it comes to things that will kill people.
“Super cheap crap” in this case could lead to the steering binding up and making a car drive into a crowd of people.
The car market is far from free and is probably one of the most regulated markets in the US. Introducing “free market” now to it would be quite catastrophic.
It is not like all the auto manufacturers are trying to do right now. They see this as a secondary opportunity to generate even more money from their customers and expand their SaaS offerings.
The future is grim.
China and America are not the same but the solution works against all actors: permit users to audit and change the code so dependencies on servers can be removed or replaced with ones of our choice. Without the source code to learn what it’s actually doing then all software is potentially a security threat, at best it’s just not yet guilty of being malware or having anti-features.
Why should every car owner have to also be a tech nerd or security specialist just to guarantee their car is safe to drive and own? They should be guaranteed safe before they are even sold.
Of course, consumers should have full control over the technology they buy, but it should be safe and secure before it is even sold in the first place. 
The only way to know it is safe is 3rd parties auditing it. The manufacture saying “trust me bro” ain’t it and a government audit that doesn’t show their work could be bullshit too. A single tech nerd or security specialist is in the same boat as the regular Joe - it’s a group effort. Non-techies can contribute in other ways (e.g. reporting bugs).
And I call them the closest anyone in the States will get to an affordable EV. Biden is such a suckup at times. He’s just writing a list of reasons for voters to stay home.
