A written question reached Ursula von der Leyen’s executive on November 4, signed by 14 members of the European Parliament. They want ENISA, the bloc’s cybersecurity agency, to judge how dangerous BYD vehicles are.
What the MEPs are asking for
The signatories want a formal threat assessment and, if it lands where they expect, BYD added to a list of high-risk suppliers. They also want Chinese vehicles barred from public procurement and strategic dual-use infrastructure.
Francois Kalfon, the French MEP leading the effort, framed it around China’s 2017 national intelligence law, which obliges 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 in the preamble.
The precedents the letter leans on
Kalfon cited unspecified restrictions adopted by Poland, Britain and Israel. He also repeated a Norwegian finding, without naming a brand: soldiers discovered that Chinese vehicles rented during a military exercise had filmed them and captured their base access codes.
The strongest recent anchor is the US military’s decision last month to bar BYD vehicles from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, calling them an “unacceptable” and “unmitigable risk” without elaborating.
Why procurement is the hard part
Exclusion is not straightforward. The Commission proposed tender rules in September that could favour European content, but BYD builds in Hungary and plans more plants on the continent, which keeps it eligible.
BYD pushed back to Reuters: nothing the car processes or stores, in the cloud or onboard, can be reached remotely from China, and European customer data is not handed to Chinese entities.
Kalfon separately wrote to French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu asking Paris to contain the spying risk itself. The Commission typically takes six weeks to answer.
