EU Developing Remote Shutdown Tech For All Cars

Recent reports show that European Union officials have been meeting to develop a system to help law enforcement remotely kill any cars engine. The tech would rely on a central control facility which would effectively send a kill code to the car’s engine, shutting it down entirely.

This technology is nothing new of course, many car companies offer a remote vehicle shut-down feature, but the efforts of the EU police officials is to make this kind of technology a standardized feature that would be controlled by the police, not by the car manufacturer.

Of course a standardised system like this would take years to integrate and would no doubt raise many concerns with the general public. Even members of parliament are not happy about the project and stated that “the price we pay for surrendering our democratic sovereignty is that we are governed by an unaccountable secretive clique.”

Liability could be a big issue, what if the systems are triggered by mistake while a car is travelling at speed? What about invasion of privacy, could this be the beginning of more monitoring of drivers, perhaps even location monitoring software would be used to not only shut-down a car, but to track its location “in case of theft”. Some of the thoughts that spring to mind are a little tinfoil hat brigade, but in light of many spying revelations of the last few years, it’s hardly a big stretch to come to some wild conclusions.

On an engineering level the technology already exists, so it’s not too hard to believe that it can be scaled up and standardised. It will no doubt do wonders for reducing car thefts on newer cars, but it seems it will come with a whole new set of problems for car owners.

Thank you The Verge for providing us with this information.