(by Angie Li / tr. by Phil Newell)

Editor | Su Jianxun

In the field of autopilot, another tragic accident occurred.

A XPeng Inc. P7 was loaded with a parked faulty vehicle at 80km/h speed without warning at a viaduct in Ningbo on August 10. The video scene showed that the rear of the vehicle was seriously damaged and the vehicle inspector at the rear of the vehicle was killed when he was hit and killed.

Judging from the chat records of the owner of the suspected XPeng Inc. P7 accident, the vehicle was in a state of enabling LCC (Lane Center assist) function at the time of the accident, but the vehicle failed to identify the stationary vehicle in front of it, without any warning, and it was in a state of distraction, which led to the accident and minor abrasions on the owner. At present, the police have filed a case for investigation.

XPeng Inc. has also responded: it has been verified that on the afternoon of August 10, a vehicle driven by the owner of a car in Ningbo collided with a person who checked the vehicle failure in front, resulting in casualties. We feel sad and sorry for the victims who died in this accident. At present, the traffic police department has filed a case and the store has gone to the scene to assist in handling it. We will fully cooperate with the relevant departments to investigate the accident, continue to follow up the follow-up results, and assist customers to deal with the follow-up related issues.

There are a lot of voices questioning the story. Some people think that the parking of the car hit at the time of the incident is not standard enough, but some netizens said that from the video circulated, the person was hit in the process of adjusting the warning tube. The details of the incident need to be further announced by the traffic police.

And those on the cusp of the storm are XPeng Inc. P7 and the car owner who caused the accident.

Judging from the chat records posted on the Internet, the owner of XPeng Inc. P7 said that he had encountered an emergency before, and the vehicle had early warning, but there was no warning this time. Without exception, the comments on the social platform have moved towards "20 million":Drivers must not put too much faith in auxiliary driving and do not regard auxiliary driving as autopilot.

Some netizens pointed out that XPeng Inc. 's user manual and training clearly indicated that the LCC function may not be able to identify static objects in specific situations, requiring the driver to pay attention to and take over the vehicle at all times.

Similar cases have occurred before. In April this year, a XPeng Inc. P7 crashed into a rollover vehicle in front of it after turning on auxiliary driving on the national highway. Fortunately, there were no casualties. XPeng Inc. 's official response at that time was that the preliminary judgment was that the car owner did not keep an observation of the environment in front of the vehicle and took over the vehicle in time in the process of making ACC+LCC (adaptive cruising, lane center assistance).

The implication is that car owners do not abide by the contents of the manual, car companies can not be blamed for accidents, only users can carry the pot.

This has become a strange phenomenon in the smart car industry: every time there is an auxiliary driving accident, a voice pops up to say that the car company has fulfilled its obligation to inform, and it is all due to the failure of users to take over the vehicle in time. This kind of logic is like criticizing that "girls are in danger because they go out in the middle of the night". Bad things happen because girls are not alert enough.

This is also the paradox of the self-driving industry: it is often emphasized that the current function is still in the state of auxiliary driving and that the driver is the most responsible person only after excessive publicity and tragedies.

Admittedly, at the existing legal level, drivers are not entirely innocent because they are responsible for their own driving behavior. But in fact, users are the biggest victims behind the overpublicity of autopilot.

XPeng Inc. and the car owner, what is the responsibility?

LCC (Lane Center assist) is the biggest focus of XPeng Inc. 's P7 accident at present.

According to XPeng Inc. 's user manual, lane centering assist is "a comfort assistant driving function". By configuring a monocular camera + front millimeter wave radar, the driver can control the steering wheel and continuously center the vehicle in the current lane, provided that the LCC can only be used after activating the Adaptive Cruise (ACC) function.

This function belongs to the most basic L2 level auxiliary driving category, and does not belong to XPeng Inc. 's most popular high-speed pilot auxiliary driving function NGP (point-to-point autopilot on the highway).

According to 36Kr Holdings, XPeng Inc. 's user manual contains 52 warnings about the use of ACC+LCC, listing various scenarios where the system may not work, including being unable to respond to static obstacles.

Some XPeng Inc. users said that when car owners were trained for the first time, XPeng Inc. made it clear that ACC+LCC could not identify low-speed or stationary engineering vehicles / sweepers, sideways-parked accident vehicles, protruding barriers or cement piers, and so on, requiring the owner to take over the vehicle immediately.

Wang Jin, senior partner of Haihua Yongtai Law firm, told 36Kr Holdings:The car company enumerated the situation that the system may not work in the user manual, fulfilled the preliminary obligation to inform, and indeed avoided certain risks.But the reality is that very few users actually read the instructions before driving and always keep in mind which operating conditions can turn on the function. "user manuals are often left on the shelf."

At the existing legal level, drivers need to be responsible for their own driving behavior. As for XPeng Inc., is he responsible for this incident? Wang Jin believes that further technical identification is needed.

He said that although the hit vehicle is stationary, there are still people moving around at the rear of the vehicle. In this case, what measures should the vehicle system take? Did it work? These require further technical clarification.

It is understood that XPeng Inc. P7 has the functions of forward collision warning and emergency braking AEB, which can issue early warning and take measures for the impending collision, but the early warning and braking functions are not effective in this accident; at the same time, the DMS (driver monitoring system) in the car can not detect the driver's distraction, and the driver failed to adjust in time.Visual camera + millimeter wave radar also has obvious technical shortcomings, it is difficult to detect static obstacles. These may be the causes of the tragedy.

The determination of responsibility is a long process, which requires XPeng Inc. and the owner of the car to come up with more data, or go to court or mediate in private.

Autopilot false prosperity

Back to the focus of the event.

In fact, lane centering assist is not a very new and cutting-edge feature. In the era of traditional fuel cars, there is a similar constant speed cruise function.

Wang Jin, a senior partner of Haihua Yongtai Law firm, told 36Kr Holdings that there were similar functions in the era of fuel trucks, and accidents of improper operation by car owners also occurred.But at that time, car companies would not deliberately promote constant-speed cruising as an autopilot function. But in the era of intelligent electric vehicles, autopilot has become a hot concept.

"the current discussion direction of the industry and the promotion direction of car companies have virtually made consumers feel that autopilot is just around the corner, but autopilot is only a long-term goal, and there may not be a strict distinction between how intelligent it is at present." Wang Jin said.

In other words, the whole industry, automobile companies and users have deviations in their understanding of automobile intelligence, resulting in huge faults.

Prior to this, Tesla, Inc. and NIO Inc. both had assisted driving tragedies in 2016 and 2021 respectively. Since then, the auto industry's promotion of self-driving has been curtailed (for example, the product name has been changed from "autopilot" to "pilot-assisted driving").

But in some road test videos, auto companies' autopilot is still an "invincible" state. Some time ago, XPeng Inc. released a test video of the city's NGP function in downtown areas, saying that XPeng Inc. achieved a zero takeover in 50 minutes in downtown Guangzhou, through 34 traffic lights, 14 left / right turns, 10 main and auxiliary road switches, 5 tunnels, and so on.Although this is still an engineering version of the function, the test car Demo, can not be delivered to users.

Overdrawing the expected function will often make consumers and users have unreasonable expectations for the auxiliary driving function of the vehicle. Users feel that they can be distracted, anyway, there are camera monitoring, a variety of cameras, radar and other sensors, but in fact, the system is only to assist human driving, not autopilot.

In addition, car companies play up that the system can liberate drivers' hands and feet to a certain extent, trying to teach users to trust and rely on the system, but this process is distracting.

The reality is that users have to take over the vehicle in an emergency-which itself requires a lot of attention. When will you take over? How much time is left for the car owner to take over? All this makes car owners sway back and forth in trust and mistrust systems.

This is a rather dangerous logic.

A car owner who has used the assisted driving system told 36Kr Holdings that after turning on the assisted driving system, although the physical driving fatigue will be reduced, he is actually more focused than when he is driving. "just like sitting in the copilot, I don't know if the car can really cope with it in the next second, and we should always be ready to correct the deviation of the system, which requires higher attention for the driver." The owner said.

Only those who have paid a heavy price for autopilot know that the back of prosperity is not real enough.

Admittedly, more and more car companies are preparing to install more powerful chips and use lidar as sensors in exchange for safer driving assistance. On the evening of Aug. 11, XIAOMI Lei Jun also said that the first phase of R & D would cost 3.3 billion yuan, with the goal of entering the first camp of the self-driving industry in 2024.

But while car companies look up at the self-driving starry sky, they should make consumers fully understand the gap between ideal and reality. Machine-assisted human driving should not be at the expense of human life in the process of evolution to real vehicle autopilot.