Poland, Israel and the United Kingdom have also taken action to restrict the areas in which Chinese-made EVs can operate, and even U.S. models, again, sparking technology, trust and geopolitical risk debate.  

Providing the security rationale on these decisions, Alicja Bachulska, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in the field of Asia, explained that the problem should be seen in the context of the long-term Chinese industrial policy.  

She said that, “China placed a bet on electric vehicles more than 10 years ago, which she termed as an industry that was planned by Beijing to be the industry of the future.”  

As Bachulska has observed, the introduction of connected vehicles into security issues was one of the first times China was concerned about them. In 2021, she said, “Tesla was prohibited in some of the sensitive facilities in China.”  

“That indicates that Beijing had already known that they were not ordinary cars; these vehicles are computer-like high-tech machines with the ability to gather large volumes of data.”  

She claimed that the European reservation represents a greater loss of political trust. Bachulska said, “We are emerging out of the notion that China would act like a responsible power and be more economically liberal. And in hindsight, that supposition has not been true.”  

Although a lot of emphasis is laid on the Chinese manufacturers, she has mentioned that the risks are not limited to any particular country. She warned that it can be “hacked or misused” by any related vehicle, and non-state actors may cause “future ill intent” along with future government actions.  

The Chinese EVs are still making their presence felt in Poland, where people are attracted to buying them due to low prices and high features. According to Bachulska, “people in this country tend to accept the new technologies quite freely, and the overall attitude of the population can change in case the danger of security threats becomes more tangible.”