After a fatal accident in one of its cars, Xiaomi will update its driving assistant

Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi will fix a driver assistance system defect in more than 110,000 electric cars already on the market, the national regulator announced on Friday, September 19, a few months after a fatal accident.

"The system may have a deficiency in recognizing, alerting, or managing extreme scenarios," the market regulation agency wrote in a statement. It added that Xiaomi "will perform a free software update via OTA (over the air) to eliminate this defect."

Chinese car manufacturers are engaged in a race to develop driver assistance technologies, a new battleground in an ultra-competitive market.

But these technologies have been the subject of heated debate following a fatal accident involving an SU7 vehicle in March. The SU7 is Xiaomi's flagship model. Its driver assistance mode, called "Navigate On Autopilot" (NAO), was activated at the time of the accident.

The car detected an obstacle on a construction section of the highway and issued a warning before returning control to the driver, Xiaomi explained in a report.

Seconds later, the vehicle hit a barrier at 97 km/h, killing the three young passengers.

The SU7's semi-autonomous driving system "increased the risk of collision (...) in the absence of rapid intervention by the driver," the Chinese regulator said on Friday.

Xiaomi will carry out a free remote update of 116,887 vehicles produced between February 2024 and August 2025, the company announced on the Weibo platform, a social network similar to X (formerly Twitter).

Remote software fixes, without returning to the dealer, are common practice among car manufacturers.

But news of the software update has reignited public debate around the March crash: a hashtag related to the announcement had been viewed more than 70 million times on Weibo as of Friday afternoon.