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.

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.

  • Altofaltception@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          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.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              It’s really not, and it’s also not really apples to apples.

              The Patriot Act, and the level of surveillance it enabled and continues to enable, is absolutely bad, and I am absolutely not defending it.

              But the CCP comprehensively surveils its citizenry in ways that would appall people born and raised in the west - think “you were having a bad day last week and you yelled at a rude store clerk, and a camera caught that and flagged it for a party official to review, so now your metro card won’t take you anywhere because work and home”. That’s a level of granular surveillance and control that’s commonplace in China, and would be absolutely unheard of in a non-authoritarian state.

              To get back to the main points I am expressing here:

              • the CCP is an authoritarian surveillance state
              • companies in mainland China are forced, as a matter of policy, to give the CCP an extreme level of access to basically all of their data (incidentally, this is one of the main reasons the biotech company I work at bailed on China altogether in the last couple years, despite the huge patient demographics we could address there, because their surveillance laws directly collide with a ton of western medical privacy laws)
              • the CCP is a geopolitical adversary to much of the west at this point, and is becoming more adversarial
              • the CCP has an established pattern and practice of leveraging industrial espionage and reverse engineering to further their own national interests. There are numerous significant examples of this.

              Thus, it stands to reason that the CCP, which is footing the bill for a meaningful percentage of their auto industry’s EV development costs, could very plausibly make “throw tons of sensors in there and pipe the data to us” a condition of that assistance.

              • Altofaltception@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                That example you gave about yelling at a store clerk led to a man being murdered by the police in America (George Floyd).

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          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.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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

      • Altofaltception@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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?

      • Altofaltception@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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?

    • improbablypoopingrn@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      2019 gmc terrain with 70k miles. Vacuum pump grenaded itself inside the engine. $7k to fix, needs entire new head. Do yourself a favor, buy anything but US.