Biden is worried China will use its cars to spy on Americans

• The Biden administration is investigating the risks of foreign technology in American cars.
• It says it's investigating automakers from "countries of concern" with a focus on China.

President Joe Biden is worried that China will use its cars to spy on Americans — and that the country could even remotely disable the cars' functions.

Biden announced in a statement Thursday that his administration was launching an investigation into automakers from "countries of concern," naming China exclusively. The statement said the secretary of commerce would lead the charge to determine the risks of foreign technology in everyday Americans' cars and to take action, if necessary, to protect national security.

"These cars are connected to our phones, to navigation systems, to critical infrastructure, and to the companies that made them," Biden said in his statement. "Connected vehicles from China could collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People's Republic of China."

He noted that China had placed guidelines on American cars operating in the country and questioned why America couldn't do the same for Chinese vehicles.

One Chinese automaker emerging as a dominant force in the global car market is BYD, which unseated Tesla as the world's largest EV seller last year. China's success in the EV world has come as US sales of the cars slip.

But BYD has said it has no plans to come to the US, despite its international expansion into other countries such as Mexico.

"We're not planning to come to the US," Stella Li, the executive vice president of BYD and CEO of BYD Americas, told Yahoo Finance. "It's an interesting market, but it is very complicated."

The secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, told reporters Wednesday that the investigation was designed to get ahead of the market — "before Chinese-manufactured vehicles become widespread" in the US.

"Imagine if there were thousands of Chinese vehicles on American roads that could be immediately disabled by somebody in Beijing," Raimondo said, according to the Associated Press.