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China's Xiaomi, a consumer electronics giant turned automaker, said it was 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 Saturday at a speed of around 60 mph, 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 had deployed the company's Navigate On Autopilot, an assisted-driving feature, while going around 70 mph on the expressway. The car was traveling at that speed when it reached a roadblock, because a portion of the road was under repair with traffic diverted into a different lane. 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 had called the police and emergency services. 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 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..
