Images of the burnt car have been circulating on the Chinese internet since an Aito M7 Plus electric sports utility vehicle, operated by an advanced driver assistance system, crashed on a highway in Shanxi province. April 26th.
A woman who said her husband, brother and son were killed posted the video online, calling for an investigation. The post was quickly removed and she said she would not be speaking out about the incident any further.
A Chinese business news outlet published a lengthy online investigative article questioning the safety of driver assistance systems, but the article also quickly disappeared.
State media refrained from reporting on the accident for nine days after it happened, after Chinese manufacturer Aidong Motors published a statement denying responsibility and saying the car’s automatic braking system was designed for speeds up to 53 mph, but it was traveling 71 mph when it struck the rear of the road maintenance vehicle.
In the United States, a similar accident would likely have attracted considerable attention and been the subject of government and legal investigation. The main companies using computer-guided driving technology in the United States — Tesla, Waymo and Cruise — are all subject to high-profile safety investigations.
Waymo, founded as Google’s self-driving division, is testing driverless cars in Phoenix but is facing scrutiny from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. General Motors has resumed testing of its Cruise robot taxi in Phoenix after one of its vehicles struck a human-driven vehicle in San Francisco, dragging a pedestrian in its path.
In China, the technology faces far less public or government scrutiny because the government strongly supports it and strictly limits public information about accidents. The Ministry of Transport issued safety rules in December aimed at a greater shift from humans to computers in driving cars.
“The development environment for China’s autonomous driving industry is becoming increasingly favorable, expanding the possibilities for the introduction of self-driving cars,” Wang Xianjin, deputy head of research at the ministry, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
The government does not release statistics on safety accidents involving self-driving cars or advanced driver-assistance technologies such as automatic lane-changing or obstacle avoidance on highways, which Chinese auto industry executives say are safe.
Technology giant Baidu The company has partnered with an automaker to test its driverless taxi fleet in Wuhan.
“Small scratches and dents are inevitable, but there has been no major damage so far,” Wang Yunpeng, president of Baidu’s intelligent driving business group, said in a speech.
Last month, I took six Baidu robotaxi rides over two days in Wuhan. On one occasion, without a safety driver waiting, the car slowed to a near halt in fast-moving traffic on the underside of a highway bridge high above the Yangtze River.
The car was moving from the center lane to the right lane in preparation for an exit. The driver of the blue car in the right lane, who was traveling slightly behind my car, began to slow down to let me pass. However, my car continued to slow down as well. Instead of accelerating to move into the adjacent lane, my car automatically started honking its horn to give way. Both cars continued to slow down until they were almost stuck.
A third car, traveling at highway speeds, sped around both cars. The robo-taxi slowly moved into the right lane in front of the blue car, then accelerated and took the next exit onto the bridge as planned.
I asked Baidu if it could investigate what went wrong. A spokesperson said the circumstances of the accident were unusual and that it’s rare for drivers in Wuhan to be so willing to give way. The company said it would investigate the incident and consider whether to adjust the algorithms that control its self-driving cars.
Many of the drivers in Wuhan can actually be quite aggressive: I saw another robotaxi stop at a pedestrian crossing to let people across the road, and the driver honked in annoyance.
A year ago, I took a 10-minute ride in Suzhou in a robotaxi operated by a Chinese startup that accidentally made three emergency stops, but my colleague and I were thrown forward against our seatbelts and escaped without impact or injury.
The safety driver in the car with us explained that the carefully programmed software had mistakenly thought that a pedestrian or parked car was about to move into the car’s path.
Many government departments and other agencies claim to have a role in the development of self-driving cars, but no agency has direct responsibility for regulating their safety.
Chinese companies have been conducting extensive experiments to gather data on how autonomous vehicles interact with pedestrians in Chinese cities, whose foot traffic is far greater than in most U.S. cities. In a former steel mill that’s now a park on the northwestern outskirts of Beijing, Baidu is running a three-year trial in which robot taxis drive slowly and carefully through crowds.
An interagency task force led by the Transportation Department laid out some broad safety rules in December — most robotaxis are no longer required to have safety drivers, but they must have one remote pilot for every three vehicles — but the task force delayed more detailed rules until early 2026.
Companies are trying to make as much progress as they can before the deadline to influence the final rules, with big money potentially up for grabs for the companies that develop the most widely used systems.
The cost of driver assistance and autonomous systems is primarily down to development, not manufacturing, allowing the companies that can sell the most to spread the development costs widely.
But safety concerns persist in China. On June 7, a news agency in Hainan province published a story on the front page of its website reporting that a Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan equipped with an advanced driver-assistance system had accelerated out of control, killing one person and injuring three. Within three hours, the story had risen to fourth place on the list of most-viewed news stories nationwide.
Xiaomi quickly issued a statement saying there was nothing wrong with the car involved in the accident, and any articles suggesting otherwise have since disappeared from the Chinese internet, except for a few screenshots taken by internet users.
Li Yu contributed to the research.
