A group of four lawmakers in the United States has raised concerns about Chinese companies testing advanced self-driving vehicles in the United States.
A letter addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo from Congress members Tim Walbert, Debbie Dingell, Robert E. Latta, and Marc Veasey claims that the U.S. is at risk of “ceding a serious strategic advantage” by not banning Chinese companies from testing their self-driving systems in the United States.
The Detroit Bureau notes that there are currently seven Chinese companies testing autonomous vehicles in the United States. This is despite the Chinese government having limited the ability of U.S. companies to test autonomous systems on its shores and even restricting where Tesla vehicles can drive with their semi-autonomous systems.
Read: Tesla Cars Banned For Two Months From Town That Hosts Secretive Chinese Leadership Gathering
“Technology used by AVs, LiDAR, RADAR, cameras, AI, and other advanced sensors and semiconductors, can all be used to collect data on the American people and infrastructure that could be shared back to China and ultimately to the Chinese Communist Party,” the Congress members claim in their letter. “The massive amount of data being collected by these cars could give the CCP an unprecedented vantage point into the United States. Beijing has already pioneered the use of big-data analytics to identify dissidents at home, and we are concerned that those tactics could be deployed here and abroad.”
The letter references a Bloomberg article from April where it was revealed that China’s self-driving industry had grown beyond Beijing’s regulatory guidelines and that ByteDyance, Haomo Zhixing, and Great Wall Motor recently established the country’s largest computing center for autonomous-driving infrastructure.
“It is imperative that we prioritize American leadership in autonomous vehicle technology and do not cede competitive advantages to an adversarial nation that does not share our values and commitment to freedom,” the letter adds.
