Every new car in Europe may be fitted with a police-controlled kill switch

Safely disabling a vehicle being involved in a criminal exercise is a dangerous task, which may be why the EU is hoping to create a vehicle standard that makes it possible to stop them remotely.
Imagine a world where you can report your car stolen and have the police remotely disable it, or a high speed chase that abruptly and safely comes to an end as the vehicle politely stops and powers down. Apparently that is the exact thing the European Network of Law Enforcement Technologies wants to see happen all across Europe, and they have been working in secret to create a device that they would want to become a standard in all new European vehicles.
A device that is designed to cut the fuel supply and disable the ignition to the vehicle by remote, which is controlled remotely by a police officer in front of a bank of monitors somewhere, is the basic concept that has been created so far for this would-be standard. There’s no mention of controlling the brakes or controlling the vehicle’s ability to drive, so in theory the vehicle would just coast to a stop and whoever was inside would either be captured or try and run away. It’s a six year plan that the EU hopes will result in a thorough plan that could be easily implemented by auto makers.
The idea isn’t terribly dissimilar from what is included in several US vehicles via OnStar. The biggest difference there is that the owner has to opt in to the feature, and the owner has to contact OnStar when they want it deployed. This would be a single mandatory solution for all vehicle manufacturers, and only the police would have the ability to use it.
There are more than a few obvious questions, like what happens if that system is ever compromised in some way or who precisely is responsible if the disabled vehicle crashes into a bank of cars, but the biggest problem would likely be deploying a network of transmitters that made such a feature even possible.
Whether or not this ever comes to pass is almost irrelevant when you consider that the EU thinks this is something worth pursuing in secret and wants to make it a mandatory feature moving forward. It seems like a good idea on the surface, but would ultimately only be useful for short bursts of time. Once a removal option is discovered — which won’t be long after it is announced — this will be like GPS in that it is the first thing to go when a car is stolen by professionals.