The Italian Job is giving Britain’s intelligence agencies sleepless nights. In the classic movie, the gang of cockneys led by Charlie Croker (played by Michael Caine) hijacks a truck full of stolen gold after disabling Turin’s traffic lights.

The lights are manipulated by a bungling boffin played by Benny Hill, who somehow manages to hack a clunky central computer and cause city-wide traffic jams, allowing Croker’s crew to intercept the consignment of bullion.

The movie was made in 1969 but this aspect of its plot resonates now more than ever. Only today, it’s not the traffic-management tech that fascinates but the cars themselves, which have become computers on wheels.

Brimming with sensors and cameras, with wireless connections to networks controlled by their manufacturers, they have become the latest pawns in the global battle for supremacy being waged by the world’s superpowers.

And as China’s share of the UK car market is now more than 10 per cent – and set to grow rapidly in the months and years to come as Beijing is increasingly priced out of the US market by President Trump’s tariffs – that presents us with a serious problem.

‘China could cripple the traffic in London by cutting the controls of, let’s say, 400 electric cars in one go, so they couldn’t be moved,’ Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, warned recently, saying there is a strong security case for banning the sale of all Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs).

He added: ‘This is not a scare story, it’s an actual possibility.’

Since all new vehicles are connected to the internet, they can be rendered inactive from afar with relative ease, a concept that was graphically illustrated in Ukraine after Russian troops occupied the city of Melitopol and stole advanced farm vehicles from a John Deere dealership in 2022.

Under president Xi Jinping, creating critical dependencies in foreign states is not an accident but a tool for China

Electric vehicles wait to be exported by ship from Shanghai

The Russians had shipped the machines 700 miles to Chechnya but were unable to use any of them since they were tracked and their systems shut down remotely by John Deere.

So while we are right to worry about spyware on our mobile phones, we ought also to bear in mind that EVs are giant pieces of spyware. And the threat of an Italian Job on British cites, shutting them down by disabling EVs at the command of the Chinese Communist Party, is only one chilling scenario haunting our security agencies.

EVs are the perfect tools for sabotage, surveillance, espionage – and even targeted assassinations. Chilling demonstrations of how to take control of electric cars have become a staple of cybersecurity conferences.

One group of Chinese hackers has published a report on how they tricked the self-driving software on a Tesla into swerving into oncoming traffic. Others have shown how a vehicle’s boot controls, windscreen wipers and even brakes can be activated remotely.

It was reported last week that firms working on British defence contracts have warned staff not to connect their mobile phones to Chinese-made EVs out of fear that sensitive data could be extracted and transmitted to Beijing.

‘It is safe to assume that every defence supplier is concerned about the tech in Chinese-built cars,’ one defence firm source was quoted as saying. ‘Not only could your car download your journeys, it could also scrape your text messages, voicemails and even sensitive work documents from your mobile.’

The firms reportedly include the defence giants BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Thales.

The move follows tighter restrictions imposed by the Ministry of Defence on EVs entering sensitive military sites and training bases, with chiefs insisting that staff driving not only Chinese EVs but also cars with Chinese components park at least two miles from sensitive buildings.

Rows of Chinese-made EVs dominate Bristol's port as the country floods Britain with cars

All MGs are now made in China, with the firm employing only 46 workers at its old Longbridge plant - with them restricted to inspecting imports

Despite these concerns, the Government is throwing open the door to Chinese EVs in its fanatical desire to reach its Net Zero targets. Even before Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs last month, these vehicles were coming under close scrutiny in America and the EU, both of which have imposed levies on imports.

As a result, China is scouring the globe for new markets in which to dump its growing mountain of cars. That makes the UK – which has so far shied away from introducing new tariffs on foreign cars – an even more attractive market for the likes of BYD, Ora, Geely and XPeng, as well as MG and Volvo, which are owned by China.

All MGs are now made in China, with the company employing just 46 workers at its old Longbridge plant, whose job these days is restricted to inspecting imports.

Chinese EVs are cheap, in part as a consequence of generous state subsidies and massive over-production. Chinese manufacturers have helped raise the number of sub-£30,000 EV brands for sale in the UK from nine to 29 over the last year, according to online marketplace AutoTrader.

These include the Leapmotor T03 (£15,164) and GWM ORA 03 (£24,995). AutoTrader estimates that Chinese firms could grab a quarter of the market – 400,000 cars per year – by 2030, which is when the Government has decreed that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will end.

The dangers of Beijing’s growing dominance of our car sector have been clear for some time, but largely ignored by government.

It was two years ago that Professor Jim Saker, President Of The Institute Of The Motor Industry, warned: ‘The threat of connected electric vehicles flooding the country could be the most effective Trojan horse that the Chinese establishment has to potentially paralyse or hold the UK to ransom.’ Similarly, the ability to track, eavesdrop or even remotely take control of a vehicle has not been lost on the Chinese Communist Party, which banned Tesla cars from what it regarded as sensitive sites, including military compounds, housing complexes and other government affiliated venues, such as meeting and exhibition halls.

During the World University Games in Chengdu in July 2023, Teslas were barred from parts of the city to be visited by President Xi Jinping.

And it is not just the cars themselves that offer opportunities to data-hungry secret services. Two Chinese companies, CATL and BYD, which between them control half the global supply of EV batteries, have set their sights on dominating EV ancillary industries, including charging networks and energy storage systems.

Both companies have close links with the Chinese Communist Party and have benefited from substantial subsidies. This opens up another set of security risks, since storage and charging systems need to be linked to a nation’s electrical grid.

Chinese car exporters will no doubt give guarantees of good behaviour – as TikTok, Hikvision, Huawei (and of course Jingye, the owner of British Steel) have all done in the past – but such assurances are simply not credible when these companies, like all Chinese firms, are ultimately beholden to the Communist Party.

A swathe of Chinese laws compel all companies, whether fully state-owned or nominally private, to cooperate on intelligence gathering and national security – the latter a very sweeping term in China. They simply cannot say no.

It has been argued that Chinese car companies would not engage in underhand activities because it would kill their businesses. But you would have to be very naive to buy that view.

While evidence of Beijing exploiting its control over Chinese cars on British roads may be thin on the ground at the moment, if our relations with China were to deteriorate sharply – perhaps as a result of an invasion of Taiwan – the weaponisation of technology by China would become a chilling reality. Beijing already routinely uses trade, investment and market access as tools of coercion.

The seriousness of the threat was starkly illustrated by the discovery in 2023 of a Chinese-made tracking device in then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s car during a ‘disturbing’ security sweep.

The device came sealed inside a part imported from China and had been installed by the manufacturer. Though the model was not disclosed, the official prime ministerial cars are not Chinese made.

The Government neither confirmed nor denied the report, but former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said he had been ‘reliably told’ that it was true. ‘Those devices that they’ve been putting into Downing Street cars, although they won’t admit it, [led to them] tracking where the Prime Minister was going, knowing who he is seeing. This is exactly what they can do.’

The Government is pushing ahead with plans to ditch its own fleet of petrol and diesel cars by 2027, and there appears to be no prohibition on buying Chinese replacements.

In a report published last month, the Department for Transport said all central government cars and vans will have zero emissions by the end of that year. This totals around 30,000 vehicles, since the Government has one of the largest vehicle fleets in the UK.

Intriguingly, one of the few exceptions will be the Prime Minister’s gas-guzzling Range Rover.

Computers control nearly every aspect of the operation of a modern motor vehicle – and an EV in particular. The average electric car has around 2,000 chips and is festooned with sensors and cameras. Their functions range from assisting with parking and monitoring the car’s health and maintenance, to providing alerts, adjusting operations and warning the driver about issues.

They are also connected, meaning they send and receive information in real time. This facility enables the manufacturer or insurer to remotely monitor vehicle and driver performance or to update software. As cars move towards more autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (or machine learning) plays an ever greater role, so the flow of data will multiply.

Imported EVs and related equipment can, of course, be swept for spyware, but that is to miss the point – that EVs are, in and of themselves, giant pieces of spyware. Gathering and transmitting information is intrinsic to their operation, and their software is regularly updated. As Jim Sakar, who is also head of the Centre For Automotive Management at Loughborough University, has warned: ‘Even with regulation and strict homologation [the vehicle approval process] there is no way of stopping a car manufacturer having control of the vehicle and its data if the technology is already designed to allow it.’

Small internet-connected cellular modules, the type of device that was implicated in tracking the Prime Minister’s car, act as a kind of gatekeeper and manager.

They are a vital component in the system that controls elements such as sensors, cameras, audio, geolocation capability and the engine, as well as managing the flow of vast amounts of data in and out of the vehicle. Cellular modules are not covertly placed, they are an essential part of a modern control system, yet – in the wrong hands – they are potentially a far more dangerous weapon than the most potent piece of spyware, since they determine the operation of the vehicle itself.

Charles Parton, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, has written that British security services are ‘petrified’ by the nightmare of such powers in the hands of a hostile state.

Parton, a former British diplomat who spent more than two decades specialising in China, has done more than anybody else to raise awareness of the dangers posed by cellular modules, the production of which is dominated by China. Its companies control almost two-thirds of the global market and seem on track to establish a near monopoly through the familiar tactics of heavy subsidies, cheap finance and other handouts. ‘Ultimately, you’ve got to ban any Chinese module in any vehicle and you’d have to do it quite quickly,’ says Parton.

If this were not challenge enough, the use of Chinese-made cellular modules goes far beyond EVs. They have a vast array of applications and can be found in power grids, manufacturing plants and payments systems, as well as items with online connectivity such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, smart meters and fitness trackers that are part of what is known as the Internet Of Things. ‘To ensure that such systems run efficiently, they collect huge amounts of data and metadata for analysis, processing and response management. They also deliver software updates to improve functionality,’ Parton wrote in a report for the Council On Geostrategy.

In other words, they are an indispensable – and extremely powerful – part of our lives and increasingly central to the smooth functioning of a modern economy.

And it should not be forgotten that, for China, creating critical dependencies is not an accident, but a tool – indeed a goal – of Chinese Communist Party policy.

This was set out in stark terms by Xi Jinping himself in a 2020 speech to China’s Central Financial And Economic Affairs Commission. ‘We must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China, forming powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities based on artificially cutting off supply to foreigners,’ he said.

Two more versions of The Italian Job have been made over the years, one by Hollywood in 2003 and another by Bollywood in 2012, with the later versions reflecting developments in computers and the internet.

Yet the first Italian Job still reflects modern reality in two key respects: Just as Mr Bridger (Noel Coward) masterminds the heist from his distant prison cell, so modern-day cyber spies can create mayhem remotely via the internet and tools such as EVs.

And as for the slapstick of the bumbling egghead Benny Hill, can there be any better metaphor for the Government’s confusion and dithering in the face of the growing threat from Chinese EVs?

Ian Williams is author of Vampire State: The Rise And Fall Of The Chinese Economy (Birlinn), which is out now.