Wherever Zhang’s protest leads, it is seen by many as a reminder of the urgency to strengthen regulation of the fast-growing new energy vehicle (NEV) sector. China’s NEV ownership reached 4.92 million by the end of 2020, an increase of 29.18 percent from 2019, among which electric vehicles made up 81.32 percent.
Since 2020, there have been reports of incidents involving “out-ofcontrol” Teslas from across China. In a March report, the Shanghaibased news portal IT Times wrote that it interviewed 20 Tesla owners involved in accidents in different regions and found most had one thing in common: The vehicles sped up all of a sudden and the brakes failed. In the accidents, either the vehicles were damaged, or worse, the owners were injured and the vehicles ignited, leading to huge losses.
In the US, Tesla’s current biggest market, there have also been complaints about the brake systems. In 2018, Consumer Reports, a US magazine, tested Tesla’s Model 3 and found it had a longer braking distance than any modern car they had tested. After the report, Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged the car had a brake problem, promising to roll out a solution in a few days. In the US, Tesla has been involved in hundreds of accidents involving sudden acceleration and brake failure.
A year ago, Brian Sparks, an independent investor who was impressed with the unusual high rate of complaints against Tesla for sudden unintended acceleration, filed a petition to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, requesting an investigation over 232 incidents involving Teslas. But the result, which came out in January, showed the sudden acceleration and subsequent crashes were all attributed to drivers who mistook the accelerators for brakes. Despite this, some safety advocates warned that Tesla has “put technology into the hands of consumers who don’t properly understand it and incorrectly believe their cars are capable of safely driving themselves,” The Washington Post wrote in a January report.
In response to similar accidents in China, Tesla always cited reasons like “wet ground” or the drivers “mistaking the accelerator for the brakes,” claiming its braking system worked normally.
According to Wang Xudong, with safety lapse allegations mounting, if any problems are found with the car or if the iBooster (a system that builds up brake pressure autonomously in an emergency) does not work on Tesla vehicles, the producer should suspend sales and shoulder some responsibility.
Besides Tesla, some Chinese NEV brands have racked up complaints for problems including brake failures. Wang noted that NEVs are fast to adopt new technologies, but how these technologies work in coordination is a question that requires carmakers to collect sufficient data for testing and verification.
“A car requires a long period of testing, from design to production. Even newly designed combustion vehicles need to go through constant road tests in different climate and ground conditions, like in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Northeast China, the seaside or wetlands, so they can collect tons of data to test the performance of the car, before putting it on the market. But at present there is far from enough data collection on NEVs,” Wang Xudong said.
The majority of the data collection on new vehicles should be finished in the testing phase before they launch, but in the fast pace of NEV development, some makers let consumers do the testing first, then their technicians obtain the data from background databases, Wang Xudong said.
“In this process, if something goes wrong with the program, customers lives and safety are at risk,” he added.
“For ICVs, their technology, product design and business model remain in an exploratory phase. A big challenge the industry faces is the testing and verification of their products,” Wang Yao said.
According to Wang Xudong, the protest involving Tesla has exposed wider issues and loopholes in the management of new energy vehicles at large, including data management and pre-launch testing. “It’s time to carry out comprehensive standardized regulation of the industry,” he said.