Police cars, ambulances and buses are all at risk of being remotely sabotaged by China because of Britain’s over-dependence on the country’s electric vehicle technology, security sources have told The Mail on Sunday.

China’s potential ability to control the vehicles at the flick of a switch has emerged amid growing concerns in the intelligence agencies over the Government’s softly-softly approach to Beijing.

The threat to the vehicles comes from ‘kill switches’ built into Chinese-made components found in electric vehicles (EVs), transport networks, hospitals, the power grid and renewable technologies such as solar panels.

The Metropolitan Police alone operates 1,600 electric and hybrid vehicles powered by lithium batteries that include Chinese cellular devices, which connect the cars to mobile communication networks.

Without concerted preventative action, the technology offers ‘remote actors’ the ability to access a vehicle’s electronics to cause it to stop or crash.

For this reason, Whitehall sources have told the MoS that emergency vehicles that rely on Chinese technology have been stripped down and effectively rebuilt to remove Beijing’s capacity for remote sabotage.

The drastic sweep for Chinese components comes as:

• Security experts warn that driverless cars can be hacked, ahead of Uber’s planned roll-out next year

• MI5 warns that 100 academics at UK universities have unwittingly aided Chinese intelligence

In 2022, a forensic sweep of a hybrid car used by the three prime ministers who served that year found a tracking device, which was suspected of sending data back to China.

China’s share of the British car market has boomed, doubling in the past year alone to nearly one in five of all new cars sold.

The kill switches have also been discovered in power ‘inverters’ used to connect solar panels and wind turbines to the electricity grid.

The parts were not included in any of the plans given to engineers installing the equipment, and were only found when security experts examined energy equipment and compared the parts to the official documents provided by the manufacturer.

Kill switches have also been found in the Yutong electric buses operating on British roads.

The Norwegian bus company Ruter, which first discovered the kill switch, found that the buses contained a Sim card, which connected to a Romanian provider.

This is to remotely monitor the battery to keep it from overheating, but a single software update from a different country would be sufficient to disable the vehicles.

The Chinese chips are so complex that experts say that disabling the Sim cards might not be enough to prevent the vehicles from being ‘killed’. Despite this, more Chinese-made buses have been ordered by the Department for Transport – against the wishes of security experts.

Concerns have also been raised about electric vans and lorries, with one source saying: ‘If China gets into electric vans and HGVs it poses a serious threat. They could switch them off, crash them, block roads or bridges. They would have control of our entire logistics network.’

China’s EV makers, like all ostensibly ‘private’ firms in the country, work under the Chinese Communist Party’s National Intelligence Laws requiring organisations and individuals to ‘support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work’.

Little wonder that Uber’s plans to launch driverless taxis in London next year – in partnership with Chinese tech giant Baidu – have alarmed experts, who fear the infotainment systems could easily be hacked by foreign agents.

Driverless vehicles in San Francisco were halted during a recent city-wide power failure, leading to blocked roads.

It follows the revelation in this newspaper last month that Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was regarded with suspicion by Whitehall security officials over his doveish approach to Beijing.

One source accused Mr Miliband – who pledged to go ‘further and faster’ on replacing gas and oil with renewable sources such as solar power while in his previous job as Energy Secretary – of ‘appeasing’ China.

This is despite the risks it poses to British security because the UK is so reliant on Beijing for the supply of solar panels, with two-thirds of our stock coming from China.

John Hemmings, the inaugural Director for the National Security Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, said the so-called ‘Made in China’ hacking strategy had been driven by the certification of Chinese universities as ‘world-class cyber-security schools’.

The strategy focuses on embedding secret components into Chinese electronics to bypass firewalls and establish a direct back-channel to Beijing’s battalions of state-backed hackers.

The hacking is the result of more than a decade of investment by China’s president Xi Jinping, including state-sponsored ‘hacking competitions, which has led to the creation of more than 30,000 new cyber-security experts each year.

Dr Hemmings criticised the ‘wet’ attitude of the UK Government to the Chinese threat, saying: ‘Even the EU is taking a more robust approach to Beijing than we are, which tells its own story.’

In March, the EU froze the assets of the China-based Integrity Technology Group and Anxun Information Technology in response to claims it had been involved in hacking critical infrastructure across the bloc.

It has also drafted legislation to exclude Beijing-linked companies such as Huawei from sensitive projects.

In contrast, a security source said the Government is struggling to catch up. ‘These are all pretty new ministers who change on a regular basis,’ the source said. ‘And most of them don’t understand the science and tech. Even inside the civil service it’s a mess.

‘Abolishing the science and technology department and putting it into trade means they have not got their eye on the ball. There’s a couple of people looking at this but their minds are elsewhere. At every level this issue is slipping through the cracks.’

But ideology matters, too.

‘There’s a belief in Government that growth can only come from Chinese trade and investment,’ said the source. ‘That is definitely Ed Miliband’s view. He signed a deal with China and didn’t tell anyone until a year later.

‘Ministers need their noses rubbed in it to stop them crapping all over the pavement.’

MI5’s warning last week about British academics was the first time the service has independently published a so-called ‘Espionage Alert’ – it is usually done under the direction of the Government.

It said that Chinese intelligence had tried to ‘covertly benefit’ from British AI and technology research after the academics contributed to projects funded by the China General Technology Research Institute, which it said has ‘very strong ties’ to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), because its ‘primary purpose was to fund academic research that directly improved the MSS’s technical capabilities for espionage’.

UK cyber-security experts also warn that China has the ability to shut down hospitals.

The NHS has been regarded as the country’s ‘softest underbelly’ because of its antiquated IT systems – which are now being updated frantically to counter the threat. Chinese agents attack and test the hospital systems on a regular basis.

The most audacious recent example of Chinese hacking was an operation codenamed Salt Typhoon, when aides close to former prime ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak had their private calls tracked and text messages intercepted.

The state-backed group APT31, acting on behalf of China’s MSS, also gained access to the servers of the Electoral Commission, exposing the personal details of roughly 40 million voters.

APT31 has also targeted members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China – a coalition of China-sceptic MPs and peers.

In April, the National Cyber Security Centre warned that Chinese state actors are building vast ‘covert networks’ by hijacking household items and office routers to ‘burrow’ into vital infrastructure.

Last year, it was reported that the Ministry of Defence had banned electric vehicles with Chinese components from military bases.

Staff working at RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire and the Salisbury Plain training area were told they must park the vehicles at least two miles away from key buildings in case sensors in the cars collected intelligence and sent it to Beijing.

RAF Wyton houses officials from Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing alliance formed by the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Defence minister Lord Coaker said at the time: ‘We are aware that individual defence organisations may have stricter requirements relating to electric vehicles on some sites, but we do not provide specific details for security reasons.’

Personnel have also been advised not to hold conversations in electric cars in case they are bugged.

The Five Eyes alliance issued a warning in the summer that Chinese military intelligence was targeting professional networking sites and online job platforms to obtain sensitive information.

One of Mr Miliband’s first moves after he moved to the Foreign Office in the summer was to arrange to meet Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.

Many senior members of the UK’s diplomatic and intelligence community regard Mr Miliband as ‘weak’ on the security threat posed by the country.

Mr Miliband supports building closer ties with Beijing – because, they suspect, the regime is so central to his zealously advocated Net Zero goals.

A National Police Chiefs Council spokesman said: ‘UK policing follows Government guidance on protecting all our infrastructure, including vehicles.

‘Any assessment of national security risks relating to vehicle technology, telecommunications or overseas supply chains is a matter for Government and the national security authorities.’