China has banned automakers from using the terms «smart» or «autonomous driving» when advertising driver assistance features and is tightening controls on «remote» system updates, according to Reuters.
The ban came from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in response to a recent fatal accident involving a Xiaomi SUV7, when the car hit a pole and the driver took over control with ADAS just seconds before the collision. The electric car caught fire and three people died.
The updated rules also include a ban on introducing new features through software updates for driver assistance systems already in use by the customer — without prior testing and approval by the Chinese government.
The remote software update system was first popularized by Tesla, and it has become critical for automakers trying to stay competitive. Elon Musk’s company has repeatedly been accused of misleadingly advertising its cars as fully autonomous. To protect itself from liability, Tesla now limits its own terms, calling the most advanced system «Fully Autonomous Driving (Supervised)», and monitors drivers to make sure they keep their hands on the wheel.
As noted by GizmodoIn a 2022 report published by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), it was claimed that in the previous 12 months, Tesla accounted for about 70% of accidents involving driver assistance systems. In April 2024, the NHTSA released another report claiming that Tesla’s autopilot feature has «a critical safety gap» that can be associated with hundreds of accidents. An analysis by the Washington Post last summer also found that Tesla’s autopilot feature was involved in 17 fatalities and as many as 736 accidents since 2019 (the site again cited NHTSA data).
In late February, Tesla launched autonomous driving functions for some of its car models in China, although they were very limited compared to the US version. This was mainly due to insufficient data on Chinese roads and traffic rules»; Musk later clarified that the system was trained only on publicly available videos of local roads from the Internet.
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