The federal government is facing calls to respond to an effective ban on Chinese carmakers in the US with moves of its own.
Auto industry experts say any moves would be complicated, and risk slowing the pace of Australia’s transition to electric vehicles.
The Albanese government says it is “closely monitoring” the moves in the US, and is in talks with the Biden administration about any local implications.
I do think there is something to be said about being wary of modern cars in regards to security. I wouldn’t trust manufacturers as far as I could throw them when it comes to actually making secure systems - particularly when you’re dealing with remote connection capabilities. The focus on China is convenient for the US but I wouldn’t trust their systems either. Ford in particular has been concerning recently by patenting a way of ad serving based on user data a normal person would consider private (such as conversations within their cars). It doesn’t even take the OEM being malicious to be a problem, they only need to miss a security hole…
…or a bad financial quarter and unscrupulous executives who need to inflate their figures.
The federal opposition is questioning how Australia might respond to moves in the US to effectively ban Chinese car manufacturers on national security grounds.
If it’s the Coalition just stirring up shit again then why not just say so.
This time they are right, but not just about China but all manudacturers. Mozilla released a security and privacy evaluation report on all the major manufacturers and it was appalling.
Considering that the Australian Automotive manufacturing industry no longer exists, we have three choices; import cars, improve public transport or improve bike/ walking paths.
Since the right-wing astroturf campaigns are not supportive of walkable communities and by extension, the gulliable voter base follows along with that, what about public transport?
This is a chicken-egg problem, the Economic ‘Rationalist’ beancounters wont allow improvements to public transport and the public won’t use public transport until it is improved.
That leaves car imports. European-manufactured brands charge luxury pricing for their vehicles, even when they are not luxury brands. They also charge luxury pricing for aftersales. US manufacturers don’t make any vehicles suitable for the Australian market. Japanese and Korean manufacturers are producing some good vehicles for the Australian market, but Japan is charging European pricing and Korean vehicles are also out the price range of most people. This leaves Chinese and Indian vehicles for the price-conscious driver and Chinese and Indian manufactured former-European “luxury” vehicles for the ignorant driver.
If the government want to stop automotive imports, they will need to be Progressive. Improve mass-transit and freight infrastructure (Octopus Act 2.0), regulate new housing developments to be more walkable and retrofit existing developments to be more walkable. In the interim, they would also need to subsidise local manufacturing again. This would also need government oversight to prevent the global outsourcing of parts from the 2000s and the corporate fraud of the parent companies from The 2010s.
you forgot one more option, penalties companies which force workers to commute on jobs which not requite personal presence. It will improve public transport and reduce car usage a lot. It will also make small business to move away from cities to places where people lives.
You are right, but I did not forget. Walkable cities also includes decentralised workplaces. Whether that means WFH, or local satellite offices or colocated workspaces, they all decrease commute and increase worker satisfaction. The only businesses that still benefit from monolithic workplaces would be high security and vanity businesses.
The rise of Chinese vehicles seems like a natural evolution of the European/US/Australian/Japanese/Korean historical line.
What’s not clear to me is which of the hundreds of Chinese car manufacturers/brands will be around in the long run. When that shakes out, then I’ll start thinking about other factors.
And of course those same factors apply to all cars, no matter where their brand is from, where they are assembled, or where their parts are manufactured. So, eg, a Ford assembled in Thailand using Chinese chips may have the same issues as a Chinese brand built in China using Chinese parts. And even if the Ford is not using Chinese parts, the same issues exist, it’s just someone other than China.
The ban on Chinese companies for 5G infrastructure at least made some sense.^
Electric cars, though, seems to be just transparently economic warfare against China. Why not petrol cars? Why not every other Chinese consumer electronic device?
And it’s economic warfare that will ultimately be to the detriment of the climate, you’d have to think.
^ An aside...
but I’ll note that the ban was a tacit admission that they were not going to verify the hardware or software for the 5G towers, wherever it came from. I don’t know, maybe that’s not possible, but in any case it’s kind of troubling that even the government is just trusting the manufacturer hasn’t put any malicious backdoors in critical communications infrastructure.
What the government can do is legislate “Guaranteed BuyBack” of EVs at EOL and enforce fully recyclable vehicles. The Chinese manufacturers are providing discounted vehicles because when the battery is dead, it is not their problem. A lot of these cheaper EVs with 5 or 7 year warranties aren’t making it out of the warranty period without a new battery. When they are out-of-warranty, good luck keeping it out of landfill.
I’m all for reducing attack surfaces but we all know Tesla can already remotely disable their EVs and they are one of the most popular EVs in AU - so how will banning Chinese and Russian EV fix the problem? It just moves the control to another country. At least if we diversify it will take multiple countries working in unison to disable all of our vehicles hah.
One way to mitigate this is by giving customers control of the SIM cards that are installed in their cars. Manufacturers should not be allowed to preinstall SIMs! And the car should run without a SIM (no blocking of functionality). That would do more for this issue than banning chinese EVs.
If any kind of software should be open source, it’s software used in automobiles. None of it needs to be a trade secret. You already need to buy a car to use it, so it does not endanger the profits of the car companies. Make it a law that the software need a to be free and open source in order to sell a car.
