Denmark have reportedly found a major security blunder in their Chinese-made electric buses.
According to The Guardian, the authorities are working to solve the security loophole in hundreds of buses that enables them to be deactivated remotely.
This came after transport authorities in Norway, where the Yutong buses are also in service, found that the Chinese supplier had remote access for software updates and diagnostics to the vehicles' control systems.
Amid concerns over potential security risks, the Norwegian public transport authority Ruter decided to test two electric buses in an isolated environment.
Their investigations found that remote deactivation could be disabled by removing the buses' SIM cards; however, that could also disconnect the bus from other systems.
Bernt Reitan Jenssen, Ruter's chief executive, noted that they are planning to introduce stricter security requirements for future procurements before the arrival of the next generation of buses, which could be even "more integrated and harder to secure".
Movia, Denmark's largest public transport company, has 469 Chinese electric buses in operation, 262 of which were manufactured by Yutong.
The Chinese firm shared that it "strictly complies with the applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards of the locations where its vehicles operate" and that Yutong vehicle terminal data in the EU were stored at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacentre in Frankfurt, Germany.
