The abbreviation byd stands for “Build Your Dreams”, that is, “build your dreams”. But an increasing number of measures induces the suspicion that the acronym of the Chinese giant of electric cars, which is invading the world and seems unbeatable for product quality and prices, can mean something very different. Something like “Bypass your defensees”, that is “wandering your defenses”. Because a hypothesis takes more and more body in the West, and it is a serious and disconcerting hypothesis: espionage.
The last, surprising decision was made in mid -April by the British Defense Ministry. At the over 4,500 workers of the Royal Air Force stationed in Wyton, not far from Cambridge, he was ordered to park the car “at least two miles away” from the base (the equivalent of 3.2 kilometers) if the car is Chinese and above all if it is a Byd. The old Aerodromo of the Raf in Wyton is crucial for national security: today it houses the pathfinder building, a building of 25 thousand square meters which is the main military intelligence center of the United Kingdom and one of the most advanced in the world, where the best English analysts and officials operate 24 hours a day together with the colleagues from other NATO countries.
The prohibition, which then has extended to all the British intelligence structures, arises from the fear that integrated technology in byd vehicles, as in those of other Chinese houses, can be exploited for espionage purposes. The new electric cars, in fact, are equipped with a wide range of sensors and cameras, internal and external, but also with microphones and with advanced connectivity systems (GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G …). These systems are essential for assisted guide, navigation and software updates.
London, however, is convinced that the paraphernalia can also be used to trace the movements of the staff who work in Wyton and in other strategic military structures. Each vehicle parked in their vicinity could monitor and film movements and flows of the employees, or the surveillance networks, and could also identify vehicles or plates and provide valuable information to the secret services of the People’s Republic. In fact, all data collected could be sent to the home servers, active in China. Where since June 2017, the “law on national intelligence”, in article 7, obliges citizens and companies (at home as abroad) to “support, assist and cooperate” with the Guoanbu, the equivalent of the CIA to Beijing, providing him with any type of information “useful for the interests of the state” they come into possession. Chinese companies and citizens, moreover, are obliged to “keep every element of the intelligence work covered with which they are aware”.
For the same reasons, the main British company active in the defense-from British Aerospace to Rolls-Royce-have forbidden the electric cars of Byd, and in any case of Chinese manufacture, the parking lot near their factories. Some companies have ordered employees not to connect cell phones to cars: concern is that IT systems can install a spy-ware capable of transcribing text messages, calls of calls, localization data and sensitive documents. Companies even not recommended employees from the discussing “sensitive” work issues within vehicles, because integrated microphones or other surveillance systems could record and transmit conversations.
The British anxieties are partially originated beyond Atlantic, where from January 2024 the Pentagon is subjected by the “National Defenda Authorization Act” to the ban on buying by by Byd and from five other Chinese companies, including the Catl (Contemporary Amperex Technology) not only because they are subject to the national intelligence law, but also because they are linked to the Chinese army. The Atlantic Council, a Washington Think -ank, confirmed that Byd would have consolidated links with the Ministry of Defense of Beijing, so much so that he had already received in 2019 “a prestigious state award for contributions given to military technology”. A remarkable alarm had also aroused the former American president, Joe Biden, when on February 29, 2024 he had announced an investigation on Chinese electric vehicles, starting from those of Byd, to ensure national safety from the import of cars that his secretary to trade, Gina Raimondo, had defined verbatim “smartphones on wheels, capable of collecting enormous quantities of sensitive data”. I intrinsically connected to the commercial war between the United States and China, the investigation against “four -wheeled espionage” then pushed to restrictive standards.
In January 2025 the Bureau of Industry and American Security blocked the import of electric vehicles “designed, developed, manufactured or supplied” in China and Russia. The ban entered into force last March, but from 2027 the sale of electric cars will also be prohibited from 2027, if even one of their components (from the batteries down) is produced by a company of the People’s Republic. By presenting the standard, alongside the device dangers, the Bureau has provided new reasons for the anti-cinestick block: the fear that producers can create “interference in driving” and even “remote disabling of vehicles”.
Founded in 1995 by Wang Chuanfu, a chemist who enjoys very high consideration in the Chinese Communist Party (Last February was one of the seven top-menager received with great pomp by President Xi Jinping), Byd began producing batteries for cell phones and quickly becoming the supplier Prince of Motorola and Nokia. In 2003 the company entered the car sector and in just two years launched the first model. In 2024, with almost one million employees, Byd sold 4.3 million vehicles in the world and is a global leader in buses and electric trucks.
Its first foreign market is Brazil, where in 2024 it sold almost 77 thousand vehicles and where the house decided to build a factory in Camaçari, in the state of Bahia, with a production capacity of 300 thousand cars per year. On 23 December, however, a sudden inspection of the Brazilian Ministry of Labor discovered that 163 Chinese workers engaged in the construction of the plant were reduced almost in a state of slavery, and the investigation that derived from it is braking the plans of the company.
In Europe, the byd sold in 2024 were about 150 thousand. In the Union, however, there are rules, such as the general data protection regulation of 2016 and the date Act of 2024, which in theory should prevent undue checks on consumers. Contacted by Panorama, Byd did not want to provide answers. On its site, the house claims to be “willing to accept the supervision of regulatory bodies on its work of conformity on privacy protection”.
The suspicions that byd today are similar to those who between 2020 and 2021 affected other Chinese technological giants: Like Huawei, who then tried to land in Europe with 5G, a new mobile and wi-fi standards, or like Hikvision, who had sold tens of millions of traffic management and video surveillance in the old continent, such as cameras and facials for facial recognition. Starting from Great Britain, many European governments, fearful that Chinese ears and eyes slipped into their telecommunications, banned Huawei. The same happened to Hikvision, especially from March 2021, when the American Federal Communication Commission put it in the “black list” of Chinese companies and its products were defined as “a threat to national security and an unacceptable risk for the privacy and the safety of people”. Italy, at the time governed by Giuseppe Conte and by the alliance between the 5 Star Movement and the Democratic Party, reacted in a much more bland way. And this despite already in 2019 Copasir, the Parliamentary Committee for control over secret services, had underlined the dangerous news introduced two years earlier by Chinese law on national intelligence.
At the moment, in our country, no political actor has pronounced himself on the risks of a “Chinese espionage on four wheels”. Perhaps also because, by us, Byd landed in 2023 and sold less than 6 thousand cars. A starting point emerged only in the summer of 2024, while the hypothesis of one of his factories in Italy was shot. Giorgia Meloni’s government had been unbalanced in prescribing that the cars possibly produced in our territory should “have multimedia systems made entirely on site” and that the processing of data would have been entirely Italian. Because trusting is good, but …
