I think the issue is that the administration is in an adversarial relationship with China. Risky to allow a foreign power have a kill switch on critical infrastructure.
And in contrast to the listed items above, for civillian cars you can choose from dozens of countries who produce them. And if you cannot accept security risk of owning a "kill switch" car then you can still go back to gasoline or diesel.
I feel it's crazy to collectively accept security risks in vital electric equipment but suddenly cars are the one product that becomes a political issue. An unlike cars there are very limited alternatives with electrical equipment.
The scale of car travel plus the inherent kinetic energy involved make a correlated risk particularly likely to lead to a mass casualty event. There are very few information system vulnerabilities with that magnitude of short-term worst case outcome.
No need to design & ship another low-cost car model for this.
Surveillance technology is nessisarially selective, so these "all or nothing" hypotheticals do not apply.
See also "slaughterbots". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
China could kill every anti-russian politican with robots, and start a nuclear shootout between the US and Russia.
I'd expect HN crowd to be smarter than nonsense security propaganda, yet it seems to work.
"security" and "war" come in all sizes and shapes. Even inter-national warfare can be of the "cold" variety, in which nobody is nuking anybody else, but making automobiles randomly unreliable could be extremely effective (for a while, anyway).
I agree with your point. But cars are the last line of defense, and they are technology most people understand. With computers, you can just unplug them at the end of the day. A backdoor in a car or a drone or something just kills you.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest solution is the most probable: they are scared of the competition, because they know that if those cars enter the market they will dominate it.
Their production infrastructure is.
> the idea that China would turn off their EVs or starting to use them as weapons from the other side of the world is borderline absurd
Is it? If we got into a shooting match with Beijing, would we not try to hijack Tesla’s OTA features to disrupt their economy?
I'm confident that even if at war with China, the US would not hijack random civilian cars, yes. That's absolutely absurd.
You mean Ukrainian Teslas. We are currently on Russia's side.
The USA isn't at war with Russia right now, despite what Russia may think about NATO (despite Ukraine still not even being in it) and proxy wars.
Of course we fucking would. Maybe not in a shooting match, which I guess means a proxy war. But if we went to war? If Americans were dying? It would be ridiculous not to.
Do you think China would permit vehicles it could disable to allow Americans to travel to and from jobs that might involve attacking it? Do you think they have some moral obligation to allow that?
Yet we don't ban those on security concerns.
Thus, this points to the fact that it's merely being scared of competition, not security.
Sure about that?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-congressional-committee-...
https://www.techtarget.com/WhatIs/feature/Chinese-companies-...