It’s no surprise, as kill switches are pretty much ubiquitous.
And worse, they can be set to explode if their speed is under 50mph
Fortunately they use kph. Dodged a bullet there…
Damn you, metric system!!
Slightly less worrisome than your F35 or what-have-you but yes, it’s an annoying trend overall.
A military alliance ally vs. a foreign rival that is friends with your enemy. The US has been flaky lately but still
The US is no one’s ally, except the ultra rich.
Just like Teslas.
Their real kill switch are in the door handles!
And John Deere.
Killswitches may be common, but it is major security implications if infrastructure is sold with them without the buyer knowing about them, which appears to the case here.
It also makes a case to not buy hardware from China if their manufacturers install these killswitches and don’t notify their owners.
There’s no kill switch, the bus uses OTA updates like 95% of new buses, and soon 100% that could conceivably be used as a kill switch.
The article lies by omission.
One form of lying by omission is not to discuss whether this is unique or unusual to Chinese vehicles.
Similar backdoor control capabilities, usually at least officially frowned upon in Western tech companies, weren’t found in buses bought from Dutch company VDL.
Looks like that was discussed in the article.
I looked up the top 5 bus manufacturers in Europe, accounting for a combined 80-90% of new buses.
All of them use OTA updates.
The author picks a very unusual bus without telling the reader to make the reader believe this is a chinese problem and not standard practice in 2025.
There’s a difference between consensual OTA updates (meaning the bus company would manually need to confirm the update) and non-consensual OTA updates (meaning it is done regardless of the bus company’s wishes).
The Chinese buses are capable of the latter which is a gigantic security vulnerability. You do not want any operating system anywhere to update itself without consent.
No I think floofloof meant that the article doesn’t point out that Tesla and John Deere products have that same feature.
There’s no kill switch
You cannot know that, and it’s a big problem.
Well yeah? I just assume that anything with remote access not directly from my country can be disabled and render useless at anytimes even more when it’s come from a dictatorial empire
Why put the caveat that it’s not from your country? If it has remote access, it can be remotely disabled. Maybe it’s from a designed feature, or maybe it gets hacked.
Xenophobia.
People were reporting on cars being remotely accessed and disabled over 10 years ago. If it has any communication with outside systems, it is susceptible to malevolent actors.
Also cars have notoriously bad security. I doubt buses are better.
It 100% can even if from my country but if done legally i have at least some kind of recourse
Nothing i can do if china choose to disable stuff because they don’t like where i live anymore
What is the actual likelihood of the following:
- China remotely disabling it
- hackers remotely disabling it
- company grifting you
IMO, that list goes from least likely to most likely, and this story is likely just FUD to reward some local manufacturer or other interest.
Now give the ability to disable them to the local unions >:)
Norway has a lot state fed propaganda.
Source?
