Chinese Electric Vehicles Are A National Security Threat

Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to do what I hope is part of the responsibility of a Member of Congress, which is to flag and alert for future threats that are just around the corner. For me, that threat is the potential for thousands of Chinese electric vehicles and connected vehicles coming into the U.S. marketplace.

I am a former CIA officer and a Pentagon official, and I want to flag that the prospect of thousands of Chinese-made connected vehicles coming into the country would give them a huge amount of data, high- fidelity data on things like U.S. military bases, key infrastructure facilities, like bridges and electric grid nodes, secretive locations, individual leaders even, all while China refuses to give reciprocity on that same exact data for American companies operating in China. They know exactly how sensitive the data is that can be collected off of electric and connected vehicles.

Here is the story if you think this is fantasy: In 2021, for the first time, a Chinese-connected vehicle was sold in the European Union; not that long ago, post-COVID. Already, they have nearly 25 percent of the market share in the European Union. These vehicles are much nicer than they used to be. They are underselling every single vehicle on the market there because they are subsidized by the Chinese Government.

I had the opportunity to raise this issue as a national security threat with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army in the past couple of weeks. I wanted to ask them specifically if they think, in their national security capacity, that mapping, radar, cameras, light detection, and Bluetooth-connected software would be a threat on our facilities here and having those kinds of volumes of data.

The Secretary of Defense could not have made it more clear that this would give a potential adversary extremely detailed information for targeting, for counteracting some of our infrastructure, for going after even individual leaders.

Now, we are an open-market society. What is happening right now is these Chinese companies are getting very interested in opening facilities in Mexico and using the USMCA, or what people commonly refer to as NAFTA, to just easily come over our border. We don't have a process in place right now to vet with a national security lens these imports that are coming in, and I have a real problem with that.

I think we need to get better at understanding that the future of threats is not necessarily just tanks and fixed-wing airplanes and all those traditional things. It is data and who controls it. For me, this is an issue that I want to alert not just because I am a Michigander, and, of course, we make American vehicles in Michigan, but as a national security professional.

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