Chinese brand in spotlight
More than a dozen members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have urged the European Commission (EC) to assess whether BYD’s vehicles pose a security threat and should be subject to restrictions.
The American military last month banned the marque’s vehicles from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa Island, Japan, claiming they pose an “unacceptable” and “unmitigable risk”.
In written questions to the EU’s executive, 14 MEPs last week asked for its cybersecurity agency to assess the level of threat and potentially include BYD on a list of “high risk” suppliers.
Francois Kalfon, the French MEP leading the push, wrote in a preamble to the questions that China’s 2017 national intelligence law requires companies to co-operate with the communist regime.
He says: “Allowing connected vehicles from third countries to access sensitive European infrastructure therefore poses an unacceptable security risk.”
BYD says no data processed or stored, whether in a car or in the cloud, can be remotely accessed from China and owners control their data. “BYD Europe does not make such data available to BYD entities or third parties in China,” it says in a statement to Reuters.
Kalfon has referred to unspecified measures taken by the UK, Poland and Israel, without naming any carmakers, that Norwegian soldiers had found that Chinese vehicles rented during a military exercise had filmed them and their access codes to military bases.
The MEPs want to know if the EC intends to restrict Chinese cars’ access to strategic dual-use infrastructure and to exclude BYD from public procurement, reports Automotive News.
