PREVENT: Building Cyber Resilience for Europe’s Electric Mobility Transition
Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly critical as public transport and mobility services become more digital, connected, and data-driven. As bus and carsharing fleets across Europe electrify to meet carbon neutrality objectives, ensuring the security and resilience of this e-mobility transition is essential.
For cities, operators, passengers, and the environment, this transition brings huge opportunities. It also creates new vulnerabilities.
Electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, fleet management systems, backend platforms, operator interfaces, and energy networks are now part of a wider connected ecosystem. When one component is vulnerable or disrupted, the impact can move beyond a single vehicle or charging point, affecting operations, services, and passengers.
That is the starting point for PREVENT: securing electric mobility as one connected ecosystem, rather than a set of individual parts.
Short for Protecting Road Electric Vehicles Ecosystem through Enhanced Cyber Resilience and Networked Threat Mitigation, PREVENT aims to deliver Europe’s first end-to-end cybersecurity framework for the e-mobility ecosystem.
With 23 partners across Europe, the project will support the resilience, availability, reliability, and safety of electric bus and carsharing fleets, helping make the shift to electric mobility sustainable, secure, and trusted.
From Cyber Protection to Cyber Resilience
As highlighted in UITP’s latest position paper, Building Cyber-Resilient Public Transport Systems, the sector must move from a narrow cybersecurity protection mindset towards stronger cyber resilience: the ability to prepare, prevent, detect, respond, and recover.
For PREVENT, this means looking at the full road e-mobility value chain: from the electricity grid connection to charging infrastructure, vehicle operations, backend platforms, fleet management, and the end user.
Based on a comprehensive Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment framework, PREVENT will design a secure modular architecture for the road e-mobility ecosystem.
The project will identify where cyber risks may appear, how they could affect daily operations, and which solutions can help e-mobility actors manage disruption more effectively, from prevention and detection to response and recovery.
PREVENT will also develop a testing framework for penetration testing, resilience assessment, verification, and certification methods. For public transport and shared mobility, this matters directly: cybersecurity is linked to service continuity, operational safety, and public trust.
Testing in Four Pilot Sites
PREVENT solutions will be demonstrated through four complementary pilot sites in Europe.
Each pilot brings a different operational context, allowing the project to test its solutions across public transport, carsharing, logistics, automated charging, fleet operations, and urban charging, as well as in diverse regulatory and grid environments.
- Ljubljana, Slovenia: A cyber-resilient public charging ecosystem and e-carsharing service will be tested across the full cybersecurity lifecycle, from the electricity grid connection to the EV charger and the end user. This includes reservation, rental, access control, charging, preparation for charging, and payment processing.
- Madrid, Spain: At EMT Madrid, the focus is on cybersecure smart charging for electric buses in a large-scale public transport deployment scenario. The work covers grid and depot infrastructure, charging systems, electric buses, backend platforms, operator interfaces, fleet operations, and scheduling, with testing around incident detection, response, and recovery.
- United Kingdom: For logistics operations, and with potential relevance for emergency services, cybersecure electric fleet and charge management systems will be developed and demonstrated. The aim is to explore how services can continue when charging infrastructure, telematics, data interfaces, or fleet management systems are disrupted.
- Hannover, Germany: At a light rail substation, resilient battery-backed automated charging will be tested against possible cyber risk entry points. The demonstration will assess the security of data exchange, evaluate potential hardware impacts, and show anti-tamper and fail-safe measures in action.
Project Partners Meet in Valencia
The PREVENT kick-off meeting took place on 6-7 May 2026 in Valencia, Spain. Hosted by project coordinator ETRA, the consortium gathered to align on the project scope, objectives, work organisation, and first steps.
The discussions focused on the pilot demonstrations and the applicability of cybersecurity threats across use case scenarios, user needs, and the first high-level requirements for the solutions that will be developed and tested throughout the project.
Partners also took part in a dedicated workshop to explore how cybersecurity threats could affect different use case scenarios, from charging infrastructure and fleet operations to user-facing services.
UITP’s Role in PREVENT
UITP plays an active role in making sure the public transport sector is reflected throughout PREVENT, bringing together operator needs and technical cybersecurity expertise.
Working closely with its members, UITP supports the alignment of e-Bus needs and requirements, collecting user inputs and bringing in the operational experience of public transport operators.
Relevant UITP bodies, including the Cybersecurity Committee and the Bus Division, as well as committees working on security, industry, and multimodal mobility, help connect the work to the realities of electric bus fleets, depots, charging infrastructure, and daily service delivery.
UITP also leads stakeholder management and coordinates the project’s Advisory Board to ensure broad sector input and engagement.
As PREVENT progresses, UITP will involve public transport stakeholders in project activities, including hackathons and engagement opportunities, while supporting awareness raising, dissemination, and exploitation of results with a strong focus on public transport.
Towards Secure, Resilient, and Trusted Electric Mobility
The electrification of public transport and shared mobility is one of the key steps towards a more sustainable future.
But a successful transition also depends on trust. Operators need confidence in their systems. Cities need confidence in their infrastructure. Passengers need to know that services will remain safe and reliable. And the wider sector needs to make sure that electric mobility can grow without introducing new risks.
Through its end-to-end cybersecurity framework, four pilot sites, stakeholder engagement, and strong public transport involvement, PREVENT will help make cybersecurity a practical part of Europe’s e-mobility transition.
Stay tuned as PREVENT works to support safer, more reliable, and more trusted electric mobility across Europe!