Foreign cars and their drivers are in the headlines in Nanjing this week, as a photo of a driver who appeared to be sleeping while using Tesla’s Autopilot feature went viral, and a McClaren sports car had its top neatly sliced off by rear ending a flatbed truck.
It was yesterday, 19 October, at 02:10 when the multi-million renminbi McClaren car ploughed into the flat bed truck on Wangfu Da Jie in Nanjing’s Xinjiekou. The occupants were lucky to have escaped decapitation.
The fire brigade were at the scene just 10 minutes later to extract the male driver, who had unspecified injuries and was sent to hospital. A female passenger was unhurt and the vehicle almost scrapped.
The Paper reports that Nanjing Traffic Police is currently investigating and handling the accident.
As they are doing elsewhere. A little further south and a few days prior, a Tesla owner driving on the elevated section Yingtian Da Jie in Nanjing during the morning rush hour was photographed with his eyes closed and his hands far from the steering wheel.
The autonomous driving feature of Tesla, “Autopilot”, is highly sought after by the company’s many fans. However, even they were among the millions who have seen the photo online, commenting, “Your car has autonomous driving, but you still can’t drive like this”, reports The World Journal.
After the release of the photo, as of 17:00 on 14 October, it had attracted nearly 10 million views and 32,000 comments.
The Tesla driver is lucky to have woken up. On 12 August, Lin Wenqin, founder of a well-known official WeChat account died in a car accident. Lin’s vehicle, a Nio ES8, had its “Navigate on Pilot” functioning at the time, reports the Global Times.
It was also in August that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced new regulations for the safe operation of smart vehicles.
Manufacturers of such should apply technological solutions, such as hands-off detection, to ensure that drivers always have at least one hand on the steering wheel and are performing the necessary dynamic driving tasks.
