So You Know How Biden…

. . . has blocked the import of cheap Chinese EVs into the States? Yeah, there’s always that nagging feeling that the vehicles could be brought to a halt by one single update followed by some trigger – a GPS position, stopping at a set of lights, indicating a left turn – and the car bricks itself – or worse . . .

Or does he know something else? Watch any of the China-hating Youtube “news” channels and you’ll see a far more worrying thing – EVs catching fire “for no reason, just one minute going, then next the cheap Chinese trash catches fire!” as one of the presenters said. What if those were “practice runs” the CCP was carrying out as proof of concept for turning their cars into supersized pagers?

Image credit: RO (Ted, PTEC3D) Russ

It’s not hard to imagine that there’s a backdoor just waiting to be activated by an innocent-looking update. It’s also not hard to imagine how to program the failure mode, overriding the battery management systems and triggering them into a short circuit, at a time when the GPS indicates that you’re right in a busy / densely occupied part of the central business district.

One car catching fire could be handled easily, three or four would present a multitude of problems in fire management; several dozen would mean evacuating the area and accepting that you’re going to lose a fair few buildings and their contents. I’ll leave you to imagine if the software update just ordered a mass gogo-car-kaboom . . .

Any Solutions?

I’m glad you asked – there have been efforts by independent Free Open Source Software organisations to create alternate operating systems to the one an EV comes installed with. The only one I’ve heard anything about is an alternative to Tesla’s car OS but if the issues I’ve described are widely distributed (which is, yes, a hint to please use the Share icons under this article to share it far and wide!) then a few FOSS developers will be intrigued by the idea, and will have a go at creating alternative EV-OSes.

Should The Government Lead These Efforts?

Hell NO!

Absolutely no corporation or government should be involved, but they should all be required to make funds and their vehicle specifications freely available to FOSS groups to make the new OSes and develop updating systems for them and keep them up to date. Open Source software is freely available for anyone to examine, improve on, or find malware in. That’s the beauty of FOSS – unless there’s a concerted effort among programmers and developers to deliberately create an Evil EV-OS, they’ll keep each other honest. And if that group doesn’t, one of the other groups will be examining the software and should find any hidden Easter Eggs.


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