China’s Xiaomi, a consumer electronics giant turned automaker, said it is cooperating with a police investigation into a fatal crash involving one of its electric vehicles while the driver was using the car’s autonomous driving features.
A Xiaomi SU7 sedan drove into a concrete guardrail on an expressway in eastern China late on Saturday night at around 60 miles per hour, according to a post on Xiaomi’s official social media account. On Tuesday, local media published reports about the collision and ensuing fire, which killed three college students, along with pictures of the charred remains of the vehicle.
Xiaomi said the driver deployed the company’s Navigate On Autopilot, an assisted driving feature, while going around 70 miles per hour on the expressway. Seconds before the collision, the car warned that there were obstacles ahead and started to decelerate but it was too late. The company said it called the police and emergency services.
The fatal crash took place one year after the launch of Xiaomi’s SU7 electric vehicle, marking a major shift for a company that had gained a cultlike following for its smartphones and home appliances. And the SU7, which bears a resemblance to the Porsche Taycan at a fraction of the price, has been a breakthrough success in China’s cutthroat electric vehicle market. It sold more than 200,000 units in its first year.
The ability of a company with no automotive experience to build and sell a car capable of gaining market share so quickly is a testament to the advantages of China’s supply chain of batteries and key components for electric vehicles. It is also a warning to the automotive industry that the competition is no longer limited to traditional car brands, but to almost any company adept at manufacturing electronic products efficiently and inexpensively.
Xiaomi’s stock has fallen nearly 9 percent on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week. Last week, the company raised about $5.5 billion by selling new shares to fund an expansion in the electric vehicle business.
China has aggressively promoted assisted driving or driverless technology in a bid to establish global leadership in the emerging field. Many Chinese makers of electric vehicles include these advanced features on their mass-production cars. When there are fatal accidents involving the technology, information about the crashes is quietly removed from the Chinese internet.
Xiaomi promotes its assisted driving capabilities on the company’s official website. It says that the car can automatically accelerate or decelerate, change lanes, enter and exit a highway and avoid construction. However, it cautions that these “intelligent assisted driving” features cannot “completely replace” a driver controlling the vehicle.
Xiaomi said the car involved in the crash was a standard model of its SU7. That model is not equipped with mounted laser-based sensors known as lidar, an acronym for light detection and ranging systems.
Wang Yinglai, an automobile expert at the Zhejiang Consumer Council, told state-run media that a car driving on the highway would have more difficulty detecting stationary or slow-moving objects in front without that laser-based sensor.
On the Chinese social media service Weibo, a woman with the surname Wang who the platform verified as the mother of one of the victims, said Xiaomi has not contacted the family since the tragedy.
“My home has collapsed after my daughter’s accident,” Ms. Wang wrote. “We just want an explanation.”
China’s Southern Metropolis Daily, a newspaper run by the ruling Communist Party, reported that a father of one of the other victims said his daughter and a classmate burned to death in the crash. He, too, said the company had not contacted him.
