A very heart-wrenching piece of news.
At around 16:34 on April 26, 2024, a Wenjie M7 Plus was involved in a rear-end collision with a road maintenance vehicle in Yuncheng, Shanxi Province.
As a result, all three people in the car were killed, and one of the victims was a 2-year-old baby.
According to the family of the owner, the two victims sitting in the back seat were burned in the car for a long, long time.
It can be seen from the video uploaded on the Internet that after the rear-end collision, the M7 was shrouded in raging fire, and the kind car owner and two road workers who passed by actively carried out the rescue, and kept smashing the second row of windows, but unfortunately, all three people died in the end.
The owner's family said on social platforms that the M7 was purchased only three months ago, and his younger brother bought it in January this year, with a purchase price of about 250,000 yuan, which was confirmed to have an AEB function. The three people in the car were her husband, younger brother, and son.
Regarding this accident, the families of the victims raised four questions:
1. Why did I get the news two hours after the incident? Q.I.'s customer service still called to ask about the "after-sales experience" instead of intervening in the rescue?
2. Why don't AEB and GAEB have automatic emergency braking?
3. Why is the battery still on fire when the protection is so good?
4. Why is the airbag not protected?
At noon on April 28, the third day after the incident, AITO responded to the accident on Weibo:
Roughly speaking, the model where the accident occurred was a non-intelligent driving version, there was no spontaneous combustion of the battery, and the airbag was opened normally.
As of press time, the official investigation results have not come out, and Azu is not good at making judgments.
However, Azu also has two questions, which he hopes will be answered by the official.
As can be seen from the video of the accident, the fire of the car was at the front of the car. The battery is under the car, so it can be determined that it is not the battery that is on fire, but the range extender that is on fire.
Since it wasn't the battery that caught fire, at least the two people sitting in the back should have a chance to escape.
Why did the two people in the back row fail to open the car door to escape, and were finally burned alive, and they burned for a long time?
Azu looked up some information on the Internet, and the M7 uses hidden door handles. The problem with hidden door handles is that after an accident, rescuers have no way to save people in the first place by pulling the open door.
But usually, after a collision, the hidden door handle should automatically pop out, and not only that, but it should also automatically lower the window and unlock the door to facilitate the escape of the occupants.
Otherwise, it is to make consumers wait for death after spontaneous combustion or serious collision.
So here's the question,
What a Zhihu netizen said is very reasonable, he thinks that the collision directly killed the low-voltage power supply system.
If the facts are as speculated by netizens, then Wenjie needs to bear the main responsibility for this accident.
Azu suggested that in the future, new energy vehicle companies should not blindly pursue a sense of science and technology, but should consider equipping with mechanical door opening devices to ensure the personal safety of consumers at critical moments.
There is another responsibility that may also need to be borne by the questioning community.
Among the several questions raised by the victims' families, there was one - why did AEB and GAEB not have automatic emergency braking?
This problem may not be clear to the victim and the victim's family from the time they bought the car until now, and the M7 Plus is also known as the mentally retarded version. This version has an AEB trigger cap of 80.
According to the official report, at the time of the accident, the speed of the M7 Plus was 115Km/h. This speed can only be triggered by the high-spec Max version.
Regarding the AEB trigger issue, did the staff of Qjie M7 make it clear to consumers when they were selling?
If the victim was clear about this problem when buying a car, knowing that more than 80, AEB is useless, then when he is driving at high speeds, will he be doubly careful, so is it possible that the tragedy will not happen?
Around 2023, at Huawei's spring flagship new product launch conference, Yu Chengdong, Huawei's Executive Director, CEO of the Device Business, and CEO of the Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, said:
"None of the cars in the car have been burned, and once the mall caught fire, and it was the other part of the mall that caught fire and burned our car. Many cars are burning almost every day, and many car companies' cars are in Huawei's quality standards and cannot leave the factory at all. In the field of cars, we want to be the first in quality. ”
I didn't expect the slap in the face to come so thoroughly, and the question of "quality first" not only burned, but also led to the death of three people.
It's not uncommon for electric cars to catch fire. Almost every once in a while, there is news about it.
Two months ago, a Xpeng P7 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, caught fire after an accident, and the driver unfortunately died, and Xpeng Motors issued an announcement saying that the speed of the collision reached 145km/h.
At noon on August 1, 2023, a NIO ES8 in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province collided with a road pillar and instantly disintegrated and exploded and caught fire, and the driver, Shen, died after being rescued.
The main reason why electric vehicles are prone to fire is that if a collision occurs during the driving of electric vehicles, it is easy to cause deformation of the battery pack and cells, resulting in "thermal runaway" of the battery short circuit.
Although experts have repeatedly emphasized that gasoline vehicles are more susceptible to spontaneous combustion than electric vehicles.
For example, Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, once cited data from the National Fire and Rescue Administration to prove this conclusion.
In the first quarter of 2023, the spontaneous combustion rate of new energy vehicles was 0.44 per 10,000, lower than the 0.58 per 10,000 of fuel vehicles in the same period.
But one fact that needs to be faced is that fuel vehicles can at least be saved, and in these accidents where electric vehicles catch fire and spontaneously combust, almost no one survives. Most of the time, before there was time for rescue, the car had burned out.
The number of casualties seems to be just a cold number, but behind the numbers, there are all the lives that should have existed, and the families that should not have suffered so much.
EV companies need to put consumer safety first.