The United States science and technology safety review of China is further extending to autopilot parts. TechCrunch cites sources who claim that the Idaho National Laboratory under the United States Department of Energy is assessing whether the manufacture of laser radars in China, if used on a large scale in United States vehicles, would pose a security risk.
The review was allegedly funded by one or more companies in the electric vehicle and auto-driving industries, but the particular business has not yet been made public. The Idaho National Laboratory did not comment on this, but simply stated that the project could not be discussed with the media. China’s producers have also failed to respond to queries about the technology and quick-movement.
Review focus on two types of risk
Laser radar is a commonly used sensor for automatic driving, which measures the distance of the surrounding object mainly through laser pulses. It was noted that the focus of the assessment was not only on the issue of the place of origin, but also on whether the equipment itself had cyber and data security risks.
Omer Keilaf, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Israeli laser radar company Innoviz, stated that the risk was broadly divided into two levels: supply chain dependence and cybersecurity. The former relates to the possibility of increasing the cost of subsequent replacement and maintenance if the entire autopilot system is built on the Chinese supply chain; the latter includes extensive disruption of equipment or the compression of high-precision environmental data collected.
However, the report also mentions that there is no publicly available evidence that China ' s laser radar manufacture has triggered such large-scale security incidents in United States vehicles and that the concerns are still at the assessment stage.
Prices push for discussion
The warming of this topic is associated with the rapid decline in the price of laser radar in recent years. Ten years ago, the price of a set of products was up to $75,000, and some of them have now fallen to hundreds of dollars. As production capacity expands, Chinese producers have a clear advantage over costs.
In recent years, the United States-owned laser radar industry has been under constant pressure, and the industry has become integrated and some companies have even been subject to insolvency proceedings. The price gap has also led some U.S. car companies and auto-pilot companies to begin considering the inclusion of Chinese laser radar in sensor programmes. Rivian was mentioned as one of the potential adopters to be named by outsiders.
It's still not covered by laser radar.
Currently, United States enterprises can still use Chinese laser radar, but the policy boundaries are not yet fully clear. The United States Department of Defense has placed a “1260H” list of whaling technologies and quick-motivation to restrict its operations with the United States military, but this measure does not amount to a general civil ban.
In 2025, the United States Department of Commerce had banned Chinese-made network hardware from the United States passenger vehicle system, but laser radar and other autopilot sensors were not included in the ban. United States Senator Tammy Baldwin, for her part, expressed concern that the equipment might be used for military or industrial espionage and was promoting restrictions on taxpayers ' funds to procure such technology.
Additional information:It was reported that in early 2024, auto-driving vehicles, partially using a whaling sensor, had been suspended for one day because of the year-year date processing problem. The incident was not a security attack, but showed that the operation of the vehicle would be directly affected if the key sensors were centralized and failed.