25/03/2025
Neil @ Carrosserie cars
Chinese electric cars are coming to take over the world, and the UK.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, after all, we had a rehersal for this in the 60's and 70's with Japanese cars.
While we were all driving (I was going to say happily, but you remember, right! Austin, Morris, Triumph, Ford and Vauxhall - along came the weirdly named Daihatsu, Datsun, Mazda, Honda and Toyota.
They were laughed at as unsophisticated, very poor imitations of our fine British cars. But then they started selling well. For substantially less money they had all those features only found in executive cars: heated rear window, electric windows, central locking!
As a child, consulting car brochures, I tried to persuade my dad to buy a Datsun 180 Estate - it had all this and more. He simply refused, ignoring me and carrying buying a Morris Marina. When that let him down he switched to Renault - but would never buy a Japanese car.
But eventually they wore us down - not just on spec, but reliability and price. First we laughed at them, then we ignored them, and next time we looked they had taken over.
Well it's happening again. This time from China with names like BYD (Build Your Dreams), Ora Funky Cat, Hedgehog, Zotye - and they're even using the MG name now.
BYD also build and supply electric double-decker buses - in use in London.
They are equipped with all the gadgets that we could wish for - all at prices as low as £10k.
So the playbook is written and repeating 50 years on, but this time there is a very big difference.
Last time 'all' they did was drove our unionised car industry into insolvency.
This time it could be a lot worse.
It has your data, the internet, connection to your smartphone (and your entire life like banking, health, email and messages). Listening to your conversations.
Now is this just a scare story? A terrible conspiracy theory? Well it could be. Or:
Former president Biden specifically raised Chinese cars and trucks as a national security threat last year and his secretary of state Antony Blinken raised the matter of China allegedly dumping cheap EVs in the West with the Chinese government last week.
The security “problem” that is being anticipated is that an electric car is always internet-connected, and acts like a giant, data-gobbling mobile phone. A Hong Kong-born reader of a recent New York Times article put the security objections to the new imports eloquently.
Arguing that people were buying a cheap car in exchange for national internet security he wrote: “Don’t any of you remember why we banned Chinese-designed Huawei and ZTE telecommunications equipment from becoming part of our phone and network infrastructure?
“Now imagine thousands of internet-connected Chinese programmed computers in control of your Chinese-made cars roaming the country spying, spreading computer viruses, sending your travel history, maybe even everything you say, Alexa-style, to China.”
“I know that introducing Chinese programmed cars alone won’t overthrow US democracy,” the commentator concluded, “but why deliver one more weapon into the hands of a known hostile power?”
So it could be one or the other. But the big problem is we won't know until it is too late if it is.
I will leave the final word on this to Dr Ilaria Mazzocco, the Mandarin-speaking senior fellow in Chinese business and economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC:
"But the real question is, would they (the Chinese state) do it? And I think the answer, we all know, is probably yes."
