Q M7 hit and killed someone, should Huawei take the blame?

虎嗅APP

2024-04-30 09:38Posted on the official account of Beijing Tiger Sniff APP

Produced by丨Tiger Sniff Automobile Group

The author is thoughtful

Header picture丨Screenshot of the online video

The sudden accident and the ensuing controversy and suspicion have once again befallen "smart driving" in the past two days.

On April 26, a Wenjie M7 rear-ended a road maintenance vehicle in the Shanxi Yuncheng section of the Houping Expressway. The accident caused a fire on the M7, killing all three people in the vehicle, including a 2-year-old child.

Subsequently, a Shanxi Yuncheng netizen posted a number of short videos in a row, saying that his younger brother was the driver of the accident vehicle, and the new car had only been purchased for three months, and the two passengers in the back of the car were his husband and son. In the video, the person raises two major questions:

1. If the maintenance vehicle occupies the fast lane, is there any problem such as not placing clear road warning signs, driving below the prescribed speed limit, and failing to take safety measures in time?

2. Why did the claimed AEB automatic emergency braking, GAEB special-shaped obstacle automatic emergency braking function, airbag and ternary lithium battery thermal runaway protection and other configurations claimed to be equipped with the Wenjie M7 Plus rear-wheel drive 5-seater model driven by his younger brother not work?

In this regard, some media learned from the question that the airbag of the car was opened normally, and there was no spontaneous combustion of the power battery. Because the vehicle is an entry-level non-intelligent driving model, it is not equipped with Huawei's ADS high-end intelligent driving assistance system, but uses the Bosch solution. Since the AEB scheme of the latter has an operating range of 4-85 km/h, the speed of 115 km/h in a collision is already beyond the functional range.

Huawei Zhijia obviously does not want to take the blame for this accident.

At present, the traffic accident is still under investigation. Before the results of the investigation by the traffic police department come out, Tiger Sniff Auto would like to discuss several questions: What kind of cognition and operation should the public, especially the driver, match between AEB and intelligent driving? Why is Huawei "throwing the pot"? Where else may the same deadly safety hazards be?

In the process of the birth and development of new things, there will always be accidents and pains. But in any case, the less blood the better.

With AEB, why crash into a sprinkler truck?

After the incident began to ferment on the 28th, Bosch, a well-known auto parts supplier, also issued its own statement to the media and the public in response to market rumors, saying that the vehicles involved were also not equipped with Bosch intelligent driving systems (including AEB).

However, this "Rashomon" did not last long. Our colleague, @Autolab evaluator, posted on Weibo that the accident car was equipped with a complete set of ADAS solutions from FreeTech, and the company and Bosch together form the intelligent driving solution provider of the entry-level version of the M7.

In this regard, Bu Xi (pseudonym), who works at a supplier of intelligent driving solutions similar to Bosch and Foretek, speculated that the "false negative" of the AEB function of the facility vehicle was most likely the cause of the accident.

"From a process point of view, the AEB system functions by first requiring the vehicle's visual perception system to detect an obstacle in front of it and send a 'FLAG' (signal) to the actuator, which then operates the vehicle's ESP for emergency braking. Among them, the accurate perception and judgment of the vision system and the efficient execution of the actuator are indispensable. "If the FLAG of the visual perception module is late, or if the actuator execution chain is too long, it may cause an accident." ”

Similarly, when the vehicle speed exceeds the upper limit of the AEB function calibration, the AEB function may not be triggered. In order to avoid false positives and false negatives from causing bad experience or even security risks to users, suppliers and car companies set the trigger speed range of AEB within a certain value.

According to the @Autolab evaluators, domestic regulations generally set the AEB relative speed at 60 km/h. "In the past few years, Huawei has taken everyone to roll up, and some high-end intelligent driving versions with lidar can be triggered at 120 km/h for some large targets. ”

Common AEB tests

"Generally speaking, strong car companies like BMW and Mercedes-Benz will put forward their AEB needs to suppliers. They tend to have high requirements for the upper limit of the trigger speed of the function, and the supplier is forced to meet the demand. Suppliers such as Bosch and Fretek will give a relatively more conservative solution based on the number of sensor frames, actuators, and the intelligence of the vehicle chassis. "It's not harmful to reveal to the author.

Of course, this does not mean that people will be able to sit back and relax in the future as the speed limit of the AEB function continues to increase. Innocent means that when the system is too sensitive to obstacles, AEB mistriggering often occurs. Once the probability is too high, it is easy to cause traffic accidents. In the past few years, brands such as Toyota and Volkswagen have recalled vehicles due to too many false positives from AEB. However, if the system chooses to filter out some suspected signals, it can cause false negatives, causing the vehicle to not brake in the face of obstacles.

"To put it bluntly, these are two sides of the same coin. We all want the system to be able to accurately distinguish each object and act accordingly, but this goal is really not possible under the current state of technology. ”

Why did Huawei have to "dump the pot" to Bosch for the first time?

In this case, the pull of all parties is actually worth paying attention to.

Previously, both Xpeng and NIO had accidents in which the vehicle owner had caused casualties due to underreporting when the intelligent driving function was activated. However, these car companies often choose to "admit" the accident, or make it clear in subsequent official statements that the improper operation of the car owner is the cause of the accident.

Only this time, the news came out soon after the accident of the M7, saying that the model was not equipped with an intelligent driving system independently developed by Huawei.

"In fact, in our daily work, we have a team that undertakes a lot of after-sales consulting and product improvement and optimization work for OEMs. Because cars are driving on the road every day, there are always various accidents that happen. 'Client dads' often call us and 'scold' us. "I said helplessly.

In his view, some car companies are constrained by limited technical capabilities or product planning, and often give intelligent driving function packages to suppliers. In order to create their own "leading" technology image, these car brands will unify various intelligent driving functions into a nice name, and claim that they are "independent research and development".

Obviously, this put on the model press conference, even though it can make car companies "pretend" to be comfortable, but it became a boomerang when the accident occurred. At this time, car companies can no longer "retract their confessions" and say that the cause of the accident is actually a loophole in the supplier's plan, and they are also victims, so they have to "break their teeth and swallow it in their stomachs".

"But after that, the car company will definitely scold the supplier to death, and find rectification measures to further optimize the plan. The ups and downs may only be known to us insiders. ”

The situation of the M7 is different from the above, and it does use Huawei's ADS intelligent driving and supplier solutions in the same series of models. Huawei, which is also positioned as a "supplier of incremental components for smart cars", is more inclined to "pick it up" in the event of accidents and public opinion, so the pull of the past two days has occurred.

But the author speculates that this situation should become less and less in the future. After all, Huawei has been equipped with Huawei's ADS intelligent driving system on the latest release of Zhijie S7 and Wenjie M5 cars, of which the former's entry model uses a visual perception version, and the latter is equipped with LiDAR as standard.

It is believed that with the continuous improvement of the penetration rate of ADS intelligent driving on Huawei's smart car brand, even if an accident unfortunately occurs again, Huawei will not be able to "shake off the pot".

However, the author still has to say that the AITO Wenjie brand, as the product definition and sales body of the M7, should still bear the main responsibility for the quality and reliability of the vehicle itself. Therefore, the priority of holding suppliers accountable must be the response to customer demands. That's why, in the official statement, the AITO brand does not mention suppliers Bosch or Foretek at all.

In addition to the intelligent driving itself, the inability to open the door is a big problem

In the accident video related to the M7, the statement that "rescuers were unable to open the car door from the outside and eventually burned to death in the car" is also the focus of attention from the outside world. According to the product information, the M7 does adopt the popular hidden door handle design controlled by the motor.

According to the information in the online accident video, the door handle of the vehicle does not seem to pop out.

It stands to reason that this is not very deserved. According to the "Mandatory National Standard GB 20072 (Rear Collision Safety Requirements for Passenger Cars) (Draft for Comments)" Preparation Instructions, the new standard intends to require the unlocking state of the door after a collision. After a crash test, the doors should be unlocked automatically and rescuers should be able to open at least one door for each row of seats without the use of tools.

Although this national standard has not yet been issued as an official standard, a company like Huawei, which is committed to becoming the leading player in China's smart cars, should actually take the lead in realizing it. In particular, the M7, which uses a telescopic hidden door handle, should have automatic door unlocking and automatic door handle ejection after an accident as standard options.

In fact, there have long been cases of retractable door handles failing after accidents that have hindered rescue. In 2019, there were cases of American car owners dying in the fire because the door handle of the Tesla Model S driven by the car could not be ejected after the accident, resulting in the inability of the outside world to rescue in the first place.

Therefore, the author calls on Huawei or the Wenjie brand to further explain the status of the vehicle's door handle and door unlocking in the follow-up statement. In addition, after an accident, the vehicle asked whether the emergency call function of the vehicle was connected and the driver was assisted.

Because, this is a major event related to the life safety of every M7 owner.

Car companies should not brag excessively, and users should not risk themselves

Many people may remember that in November 2023, Huawei and Xpeng will conduct a multi-day battle around the AEB function in intelligent driving. At that time, multiple rounds of war of words broke out between the two sides over whether their respective brands of cars, or technology-enabled vehicles, could trigger AEB and brake in high-speed and nighttime scenarios. In this process, third-party media platforms, including Chedi and Autohome, also conducted their own tests.

In the author's opinion, this kind of communication has indeed rolled the functional boundaries of intelligent driving to a new height to a certain extent, but it has also brought a very bad trend - excessive packaging of vehicle safety functions.

It is important to know that all functions related to vehicle safety are developed based on existing data and scenarios, and within certain parameters and boundaries. Even the most wealthy car brands will not ignore the cost and raise the standard of functional development to a level far beyond the national standard and even traffic regulations.

To put it another way: the vast majority of car companies hope that their cars can just meet the C-NCAP or E-NCAP five-star standards, and the rest of the cost is not better.

Of course, in the process of communication and marketing of new cars, car companies will use a certain value of some intelligent driving functions as a selling point to strive for greater voice in the market. It is as if even when the vehicle steps out of the test field and onto the actual road, these products are able to reproduce 100% of their performance in the test environment.

However, on the actual road, the complex system composed of weather, lane markings, road environment, other traffic participants, and other factors is definitely not something that the engineering team of an automobile company can simulate on a test site and computer simulation platform. That's why, so far, no car brand has launched a Level 4 autonomous driving product, claiming that it can be responsible for all accidents that occur after the function is turned on.

Therefore, I once again implore everyone who reads this article not to put your life in the hands of anyone else or company. Once you're on the road, make sure you're focused on driving.

After all, no one should risk their own lives and the safety of their families to verify the reliability of a technology.

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