EU lawmakers push for bloc to assess security threat from BYD cars

PARIS/BRUSSELS, Nov 4 (Reuters) – More than a dozen members of the European Parliament (MEPs) urged the European Commission on Wednesday to assess whether BYD cars pose a security threat and should be subject to restrictions, such as excluding them from public procurement purchases.

The US military, without detailing specific concerns, last month banned vehicles of the Chinese carmaker from Kadena Air Base on Japan’s Okinawa island, saying they posed an “unacceptable” and “unmitigable risk”.

In written questions to the European Union’s executive, 14 MEPs asked for the bloc’s 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 required companies to cooperate with the state.

“Allowing connected vehicles from third countries to access sensitive European infrastructure therefore poses an unacceptable security risk,” he wrote.

BYD said no data processed or stored, whether in the cloud or within a vehicle, can be remotely accessed from China, and that customers remained in control of their data. “BYD Europe does not make such data available to BYD entities or third parties in China,” it said in a statement to Reuters.

Kalfon referred to unspecified measures taken by Poland, Britain and Israel and said, without naming any auto brand, 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 Commission intends to restrict Chinese vehicles’ access to strategic dual-use infrastructure and to exclude BYD from public procurement. While the Commission proposed new rules in September for public tenders that could boost the European content of winning bids, BYD could still take part as it has a production facility in Hungary and is planning more plants on the continent.

The European Commission typically has six weeks to respond to lawmakers’ questions.

Kalfon also sent a letter to French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu on Wednesday, urging the government to take a series of measures to contain the risk of spying by Chinese connected vehicles, and BYD cars in particular.

(Reporting Gilles Guillaume and Philip Blenkinsop; additional reporting Nick Carey; editing by Kirsten Donovan)

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