Chinas Kill-Switch in unseren Bussen? Was, wenn ganz Berlin plötzlich steht

Hey welcome to Lea's insight Imagine you're sitting in a bus in Berlin in the morning on your way to work In the whole city a thousand people are doing exactly the same thing right now And then without any warning the buses all come to a sudden stop The power is out the doors are locking You're stuck in the middle of the track along with hundreds of others Emergency services cannot get through because ambulances are also stuck in the completely blocked traffic Supply chains are breaking down The entire public transportation system of a metropolis collapses all at once That sounds like something out of a science fiction movie but unfortunately it's a real possibility It's about Chinese electric vehicles Recently authorities in Norway discovered a serious security vulnerability in Chinese electric buses A single command sent from a server in China could disable electric buses across Europe And it is precisely here that it becomes critical The German railway company plans to buy 200 electric buses from the Chinese manufacturer BYD This decision has sparked a fierce debate While the Ministry of Economy criticizes a lack of healthy patriotism a completely different concern is growing in the background Namely there is a so-called kill switch in these buses a digital death button Our traffic data ends up in China If you're new here feel free to subscribe to the channel Every week here there is a new video with the exciting stories behind the news To understand the security concerns we must look to Norway In the summer of 2025 the Oslo Public Transport Company conducted a secret test A Chinese Yutong electric bus and a Dutch VDL bus were brought into a mine Hundreds of meters underground A perfect Faradian cage There the engineers made a shocking discovery The Chinese bus tried to maintain continuous contact with the outside world despite complete radio silence They found a hidden SIM card on the motherboard that did not appear in any manual And the provider A provider from Romania Why Romania Because roaming signals are much harder to track Even more alarming This SIM card had access deep into the battery management system A single command is enough to completely stop the bus while it is in motion experts confirm In contrast the Dutch bus had communication and the chassis physically separated from each other The test showed clearly This remote shutdown in the Chinese bus is not a coincidence but a deliberate design element The Norwegian report has put all of Europe on high alert The UK where nearly 1 000 Chinese electric buses are in use immediately launched an urgent review The fear is great that London's transport arteries hang by a thread on a SIM card Israel went even further The army issued a complete procurement ban For Chinese electric vehicles And prohibited them from entering military bases What's the reasoning They are espionage platforms on wheels So is this so-called death button just paranoia No In China it is already an established practice It is repeatedly used there In case of payment default disputes over battery rental fees or when users do not accept new terms of service or software updates In March 2025 dissatisfied customers at a trade show in Hangzhou even reported that their vehicles had been locked remotely Just because they wanted to protest publicly That such things also happen abroad is shown by the case of India in November 2025 According to Chinese media reports BYD overnight deactivated thousands of electric buses on the outskirts of New Delhi following a payment dispute The entire fleet was taken hostage digitally The message was clear Anyone who buys hardware tied to a foreign cloud does not truly own it He has only a revocable usage right Despite all these warnings Deutsche Bahn is sticking to its deal The Torte Society DB Regio plans to purchase over 3000 buses Most come from the German manufacturer MAN About 5 percent or roughly 200 units however go to BYD These buses are built in Hungary The railway is aware of the risks Therefore the Chinese electric buses should not be deployed at sensitive metropolitan junctions In addition they are deliberately distributed so that in the first case the entire region is not paralyzed at once But why take this risk at all The answer is the price A MAN bus costs about half a million euros A BYD bus is about 130 000 euros cheaper The railway saves about 26 million euros with 200 vehicles But actually it's about something different For Deutsche Bahn these 200 buses are a price benchmark It's not the 26 million that's important but the pressure on domestic manufacturers to lower prices for the remaining 3 000 buses But here arises a fundamental question BYD has received billions in state subsidies from China over the years It can also be a company so deeply intertwined with the Chinese state and technically capable of stopping foreign transportation systems with the press of a button does it truly qualify as private Is a saving of 20 to 25 percent worth this risk The railway is now examining technical countermeasures Also remove SIM cards or replace communication modules It sounds almost like a form of technical castration Yet precisely here lies the irony A modern electric bus essentially relies on OTA updates which are seamless software updates The advantage is precisely that security vulnerabilities can be quickly closed and new skills added globally People buy high-tech here just to mutilate it out of fear immediately In the end the railway's strategy seemed like that of a diabetic He knows exactly that a piece of cake is very dangerous But the price is simply too tempting He also eats them And he already has the insulin injection in his hand The buses will not arrive immediately Delivery will start from 2027 And now the crucial question for you If the relations between Germany and China were to deteriorate significantly would you still get on a bus knowing tha at least theoretically there are possibilities to silence him from Beijing with the press of a button The so-called death button is actually just a part of the problem The greater danger is the data Every bus continuously collects information Whether they are locations routes passengers flows traffic bottlenecks or driving behavior These data will eventually end up on the servers of the Chinese manufacturer And under Chinese law Chinese companies These data are disclosed to the state upon request Over the years this results in a precise map of our public life In a geopolitical crisis it was never about randomly shutting down buses With the help of years of collected data it would be possible to accurately determine which vehicles needed to be deactivated when and where To cause maximum disruption And that is exactly the dangerous scenario If you see it that way like and share the video So that it can reach even more people Thank you for watching and see you next time Subtitle commissioned by ZDF for funk 2017