Beijing’s four-wheeled Trojan horse

To defend Oslo Airport in the event of war, in mid-September the Norwegian army mobilised 5,000 National Guard soldiers as part of the Øvelse Hovedstad exercise. Whilst waiting, a few bored soldiers began scrolling through the menus on the screens of the hire cars provided for the occasion and discovered a video archive containing all staff movements, including the codes entered at the gates of military facilities. The vehicles included at least two Deepal models—an electric brand owned by the Chinese state-owned company Changan—supplied by Hertz Norge, a company which, through Volvo Cars, belongs to the Geely Group. This was revealed by the newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.

The soldiers deleted the footage and continued to use the same vehicles right up until the last day, as there were no alternatives. No one has proven that those images ever left the vehicles, and some of the technical press attribute the recordings to dashcams that were left on by mistake. Nevertheless, the implications remain troubling: the National Security Authority describes modern cars as computers on wheels, with over two hundred sensors on board, and Norwegian counter-intelligence has been reporting for months on an increase in operations by the People’s Republic of China within the country. Norwegian technicians themselves had already verified that Yutong electric buses could be stopped remotely via a software update. Israel has already banned Chinese cars from its bases and is removing them from officers’ use; Oslo, which has committed up to 350 million kroner to a hire agreement with Hertz, currently prefers a case-by-case approach to a ban based on nationality. In the European country that was the first to electrify its vehicle fleet, the Trojan horse – pardon, the car – poses a greater threat than it does elsewhere.