No more quick getaways (Image: Getty)

IMAGINE you could disable a car remotely just by pressing a button. It’s not a distant dream: devices that use radio waves to disrupt the control computers of modern cars are already in the pipeline. Police will be able to use them to halt suspect vehicles in their tracks.

At the request of police in France, Spain and Germany, a European Commission-funded consortium is developing such a device. Meanwhile, electronics firm E2V of Chelmsford, UK, is developing a similar system for both the police and the military, and successfully tested its technology last week.

Europe has given €4.3 million to the SAVELEC (Safe Control of Noncooperative Vehicles Through Electromagnetic Means) project. As part of this, engineers at the German Aerospace Center DLR in Stuttgart have pored over automotive Engine Control Units (ECUs) to identify vulnerabilities in microchips that can be exploited using radio signals. The electronics and portable antennas that will transmit those signals are being designed at IMST, a German radio antenna research lab in Kamp-Lintfort. At MBDA, the French missile maker based near Paris, staff are running simulations with large groups of volunteers drivers to gauge how they react when cars cut out at speed.


“We want to be able to stop the really powerful cars that we cannot stop with the tools police forces have today,” says Cécile Macé, a systems engineer at MBDA. “Really fast cars on the motorway are hard to stop in a safe way,” she notes. Police in Dallas, Texas, for instance, last year stopped using stingers –strips of tyre-shredding spikes – after five officers were killed attempting to deploy them.

The new devices work not by frying a car’s electronics as military electromagnetic pulse weapons do, but by temporarily disabling them. “We want to disturb the car’s electronics so we can stop it, but we don’t want to break the car and leave it stuck on the motorway. And we don’t want to harm the occupants, nearby pedestrians or the police with the beam either,” says Macé. Drivers should not feel the beam – but they might hear something. “This is known as the Frey microwave hearing effect and consists of audible clicks… just a pop in the ear,” she says.

We want to disturb the car’s electronics so we can stop it, but not leave it stuck on the motorway

The SAVELEC consortium has yet to test its system, but the aim is to have a prototype ready by 2016. For now, it is releasing few details in order to prevent people from developing countermeasures – or their own version. But the system is likely to be much smaller than the one E2V is working on.

Named RF Safe-Stop, E2V’s device uses a 350-kilogram transmitter mounted on an SUV and a horn-like metal waveguide to beam microwave pulses at a car or motorbike up to 60 metres away. With the vehicle’s wiring acting as an antenna, the pulses disable the ECU temporarily by constantly forcing it to reset itself. That stops the vehicle. E2V gave a proof-of-principle demonstration at Throckmorton airfield in Worcestershire, UK, last week.

Both teams need to be wary of unintended consequences, says Jay Abbott of Advanced Security Consulting in Peterborough, UK, warning that the technology might also affect steering and brake systems. “Disrupting all of them at once could potentially leave a car travelling at speed as a dead weight, with limited control over its direction and braking.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Speed gun with a twist”