OPINION:
Last month, the world was taken aback when pagers in the hands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria began exploding. The pagers, bearing the name of a Taiwanese electronics firm but manufactured in Hungary, had been waylaid by the Israelis, who embedded an ounce or so of explosives in each. They were then configured to explode via remote command.
It was a remarkable, targeted operation that took Israeli intelligence almost a year to put together. At the same time, the weaponization of the pagers made it harder to ignore the warnings of analysts who have said that electric vehicles on America’s streets and highways could be altered in much the same way by our enemies. It would actually be much easier as every EV already contains hundreds of pounds of an explosive that can be set off via access to the software on which the vehicle depends.
Since 2019, Wall Street broadband analyst Anton Wahlman has warned Americans that “connected cars” could become weapons if an enemy capable of accessing the software that controls their batteries chooses to turn them against us.
He has written that “the batteries in a Battery-Electric Vehicle (BEV) are controlled by software. This means that a software command could be issued that would deliberately cause a thermal event that would cause the battery to go up in flames on a moment’s notice.”
It doesn’t happen often, but in recent years, batteries in Teslas and other EVs have gone up in flames in their owners’ garages because of crashes on the street and on vessels delivering them to faraway markets. Several car carriers have sunk; houses have burned. And in Britain, a parking garage collapsed as the result of fires that burn hot and are hard to put out.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, authorities in North Carolina are warning that an EV caught in floodwater could be at risk of catching fire if the water reaches the vehicle’s battery.
These batteries don’t blow up on their own that often, but State Farm Insurance told its employees that it is removing the chargers from its headquarters parking garages because when they do, the resulting fires are dangerous and notoriously difficult to extinguish.
Over 1.5 million electric vehicles are on our roads, and each carries a battery weighing 1,000 pounds on average. Imagine gigantic mobile pagers with software components from China already on board and accessible to technicians as close as your nearest terrorist hacker or as far away as China, who might, in the event of an armed conflict, set them to go off simultaneously. The results would be devastating.
Mr. Wahlman and others insist this isn’t a fantasy but a devastating possibility, especially as electric and self-driving vehicles become more numerous and sophisticated. The “connected” self-driving vehicle may be seen as a 5,000-pound earthbound drone that can be directed remotely, taken over and sent to a selected target before detonating.
Mr. Wahlman says the automotive industry had “a collective heart attack recently when a remote alert triggered an accelerated thermal runaway in pagers and walkie-talkies owned by Hezbollah.”
This is so scary for the automotive industry because a battery-electric vehicle includes the same components to turn it into a remote-controlled de facto bomb like one of those pagers.
U.S. analysts and those of other nations don’t often talk about the problem publicly, but they are increasingly worried about Chinese software.
Australian technology expert Jason Van der Schyff, for example, wrote after the Hezbollah attack: “Electronic devices such as routers, phones and even cars could be compromised at any stage in their journey from the manufacturer to the end user. … The consequences of such breaches extend beyond malfunctioning devices. Compromised electronics can open the door to espionage, sabotage, and cyber-attacks, with potentially catastrophic implications for national security.”
At least one manufacturer of the batteries that power these vehicles shares Mr. Wahlman’s concerns and believes that EV makers must find alternatives to the Chinese computer hardware and software found in most of them.
Perhaps with an eye to the potential problems of concern to Mr. Wahlman and others, the Biden administration on Sept. 23 announced a issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to, among other things, “prohibit manufacturers with a nexus to [China] or Russia from selling connected vehicles that incorporate VCS hardware or software or ADS software in the United States, even if the vehicle was made in the United States.”
The proposed rule covers much more and has many problems, and neither the secretary of commerce nor the president’s national security adviser focused on the danger of an enemy taking control of a vehicle with hostile intent when it was announced. But one has to wonder.
• David Keene is an editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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