Huawei Is Done! Warnings Deleted 2 Years Ago—Now an Aito M9 Reportedly Leaks Fuel, Burns and Kills

A Huawei Aito owner in Sichuan posted a video on Douyin, China's version of TikTok, on October 22nd. The owner said the vehicle caught fire while moving, without a collision. Flames shot out from the passenger side of the dashboard. Footage shows people keeping their distance as the vehicle burned. Firefighters arrived and put out the flames, but the vehicle was destroyed. No one was hurt. The owner said an inspection report blamed the fire on sunlight refracted through an air freshener bottle. He said, With a finding like that, I have nothing left to say. One user wrote, That explanation is absurd. The car was moving the whole time. An air freshener bottle couldn't keep focusing sunlight like that. Other comments included, An air freshener bottle can really focus sunlight that well? And this video will probably be taken down too. The Aito lineup of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles is jointly designed and developed by Seres Auto and Huawei. Huawei plays a major role in defining and designing the projects. It also supplies core technology, including its Chenhui driver assistance system, HarmonyOS cockpit, Huawei sound audio system, and DriveOne powertrain platform. At Huawei's Spring flagship project launch on March 23, 2023, Executive Director Richard Yu said the company's vehicles had no record of catching fire. So far, no Aito vehicles have burned, not one. They've been on the road for two or three years, and we still have zero fires. Huawei has strict quality standards. Let me tell you, many automakers ship cars that would never be allowed out of our factories under our standards. Yet they ship them in large numbers. In the auto industry, we have to be number one. That video of you resurfaced recently. One user questioned whether Aito could still say it had zero fires. When you make phones, people might let the bragging slide. But now you're making cars, and you're still bragging all day long. People's lives are at stake. Safety has to come first. Public concerns about Ito are growing. Beyond routine complaints and vehicle fires, some incidents have cost lives. Video circulating online shows a black Ito M9 passing a traffic light and turning left at an intersection in Shenmu, part of Yulin, Shaanxi province. The incident took place on October 17. It suddenly lost control and hit a roadside traffic light pole. The vehicle burst into flames and was quickly engulfed. Police in Shenmu confirmed on October 21st that it was a single-vehicle crash. The driver was the only occupant and died. Videos of the crash spread widely online. Users speculated that a battery explosion caused the fire and questioned the safety of the model's advertised smart driving features. Aito Customer Service issued a statement on October 21st. The vehicle was being driven manually. It was traveling at 86.4 mph as it approached the intersection, where the speed limit was 31 miles per hour. Excessive speed led to a collision with a square traffic light pole, followed by a fire at the front of the vehicle. No abnormalities were detected before the incident. Our preliminary analysis indicates that the severe impact to the engine compartment at high speed caused electrical short circuits and fluid leaks, which started the fire. Aito's official statement also rejected suggestions of a battery explosion or a crash caused by driver assistance, calling them false information. But users who watched the crash footage accused the company of lying to avoid responsibility. One said the video showed the car traveling no faster than 31 miles per hour and that the fire was clearly a battery explosion. The traffic light you're looking at is where the crash happened at 11 p.m. on October 17. A local user filmed a pole at the crash site. It showed no obvious deformation, only blackening from the fire. According to locals in Shenmu, Shaanxi, this pole took a head-on hit from a vehicle weighing about 6,600 pounds, traveling at 86 miles per hour, followed by a fire. Look, it's almost completely undamaged. An employee of Shenmu's traffic police unit confirmed to the media on October 22, the traffic pole did not break. One user wrote, It didn't even break after a hit at 86 mph? That suggests China's infrastructure is pretty well built. Another said, It wasn't even doing 43 mph, let alone 86. A car crossing at an intersection at 86 mph doesn't look like that. We've driven cars before. One user posted a video explaining how to estimate the car's speed from the surveillance footage. The vlogger estimated its speed at about 46 mph, hour, well below the 86 miles per hour reported by 12309 Customer Service. Today, let's look at how to calculate speed. Speed is distance divided by time. We're using surveillance footage from an intersection. Less than two seconds pass between the car entering the frame and the crash. First, the time. The video runs at 30 frames per second, so each frame is about 0.033 seconds. Next, the distance. We use standardized road markings as a ruler. Each crosswalk stripe is about 18 inches wide, with gaps between the stripes. That gives us a lane width of about 12 feet. Now look at the directional arrows. Standard lengths are about 10, 20, or 30 feet. If we use 20 feet, the car would have to cover two arrow lengths, which doesn't work once it slows down. Only 10 feet makes sense, both in scale and physically. Once we have that measurement, we can turn the image into real distances. The first segment, from when the car enters the frame until its rear crosses the stop line, that's 8 frames, or about 0.267 seconds, covering roughly 18 feet. Divide 18 by 0.267, and you get about 67.5 feet per second. Convert that into miles per hour, and it's about 46 miles per hour. Second segment, from crossing the stop line to starting the turn. That's 27 frames, or 0.9 seconds, covering about 48 feet. Average speed is roughly 37 miles per hour. In the third segment, starting from the turn to hitting the traffic light pole. That's 23 frames, or 0.767 seconds, covering about 21 feet. Average speed, roughly 19 miles per hour. The speed drops from about 46 miles per hour into the teens, with deceleration of about 0.8 g, close to the tire's grip limit. Calculating speed isn't hard. The hard part is turning the image into a measurement device. This educational estimate has a margin of error of about plus or minus 10%. The official investigation takes precedent. Chinese news outlet The Paper raised three questions in an October 23 report. First, where was the vehicle when it was traveling at 86.4 mph, and how fast was it moving at impact? Second, did the automatic emergency braking system, or AEB, activate? Third, did the vehicle catch fire too quickly after the collision? Autovlogger Feng Shimin told the paper that the automaker's statement lacked information, left public questions unanswered, and showed little compassion for the person who died. Feng said, the statement says the vehicle was traveling at 86.4 miles per hour as it approached the intersection. That's very imprecise. It doesn't specify the time or exact location. People can't make a reasonable judgment from that. Using the surveillance footage and surveillance maps, Feng estimated that the vehicle traveled at about 190 feet in roughly two seconds from entering the frame to impact. He puts its average speed at about 65 miles per hour. At impact, he estimated it was doing about 47 miles per hour, well below the 86 miles per hour stated by Aito. Feng said the footage showed the high-mounted brake light coming on as the vehicle crossed the crosswalk. Photos posted online also showed no obvious deformation or damage to the pole. He said those details make it difficult to establish that the impact happened at high speed. Users also examined official promotional materials for the Aito M9. They list a maximum stopping speed of around 81 mph for automatic emergency braking and a maximum collision avoidance speed of about 84 miles per hour for enhanced automatic emergency steering, or EAES. The listed operating ranges are about 0.6 to 93 miles per hour for EAB, 31 to 84 miles per hour for EAES, and 6 to 81 miles per hour for lateral obstacle collision prevention. The crash statement, meanwhile, cited a speed of about 86 miles per hour. One user wrote, it looks like the manufacturer treated the system's limit as an everyday safety buffer. Others said they're using customers to test it, and another test subject has died. Even if driver assistance played no role, China's auto information and trading platform Dongchedi has warned in 2024 that Aito's fuel lines were positioned too far forward, creating a fire risk in a crash. An Aito M7 Plus rear-ended a water-spraying truck at 71 miles per hour on a in Yunchang, Shanxi Province, in April 2024. The vehicle caught fire, killing all three occupants, including a two-year-old child. Family members questioned why the advertised automatic braking had not prevented the crash. Aito later said the vehicle did not have Huawei's advanced driver assistance system and instead used a Bosch system. But Bosch issued a statement, saying its investigation found the vehicle did not have a Bosch driver assistance system. After the fatal crash in Shaanxi, Dongchedi evaluated the Aito M7. The evaluator was its head of automotive safety testing, Dongmen Jiannan, who also recently tested the Maextro V800. There were several main problems in the Aito M7 crash. First, the doors didn't unlock automatically, the hazard lights didn't come on, and the vehicle suddenly lost electrical power. We reviewed publicly available tests by professional organizations. In an earlier small overlap crash test. Another Aito M7 also lost power during the collision. It was very clear. The hazard lights flashed once and went out. The central screen went dark the moment the airbags deployed. Both point to the low voltage battery not working properly. The Aito M7 in this crash didn't have its hazard lights on either, indicating its low voltage power system wasn't functioning normally. There may be a problem with the wiring layout or the backup systems. There wasn't a backup for unlocking the doors. Traditional automakers put a lot of thought into automatic locking and unlocking. They keep setting the unlock signal in case it doesn't get through. Some also provide backup power. Dongmen said the second issue was the Aito M7 manual. The older and newer versions describe the crash-related unlocking very differently. The older manual clearly explained both airbag deployment and door unlocking. It said the doors would unlock automatically in a crash above a certain severity. But the newer manual section on automatic locking contained just one statement. When an open door is pushed to the partially latched position, it automatically pulls itself fully shut. Aito customer service said most vehicles lacked the feature. A check showed that most vehicles actually had it. A normal manual should say that all doors unlock automatically when the system detects a serious impact. Automakers should do everything possible to provide safety backups and ensure the doors unlock. But Dongmen said the newer Aito manual left the company room to avoid responsibility. If unlocking worked, it could say the feature was included. If it didn't, it could say the feature wasn't included. Dongmen Jiannan also singled out the fuel lines. The third problem we found was the fire. This may have been a serious underride crash where the car went under the truck. The radiator may then have crushed and ruptured the fuel line. The fuel line sits quite far forward, right here. A fire in that area makes rescue even harder. Also, this car locks its doors automatically at about 5, 5.6, then 6.2 miles per hour the door is locked. If a vehicle locks automatically, it also needs to unlock automatically. That's a regulatory requirement too. At the scene, we can see the doors were all locked. When they're locked, the handles retract and you can't open the doors from outside. If there's a product problem, improve it, fix it, or issue a recall. Those are all options. Users then asked whether an unchanged front fuel line design on the Aito M9 could offer another clue to the fire in Shenmu. Back in December 2023, Dong Chedi's winter testing in Mohe found that the new extended range Aito M7 achieved just 31.6% of its advertised electric-only range. It ranked last in the plug-in hybrid group, but Huawei executive director Richard Yu called the test a setup that misled the public. In January 2024, Aito, Luxeed, and other brands under Huawei's Harmony Intelligent, Mobility Alliance, suspended dealership memberships, and sales lead cooperation with auto platform Dongchedi. Links for requesting the lowest price were also closed. The official explanation was that the old agreement had expired and cooperation was paused pending a new deal. During that period, some Huawei fans accused Dongchedi of taking dirty money to smear Chinese products. Huawei has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party government and uses patriotic sentiment to sell its products. When problems arise, the company tends to deny responsibility and move to silence discussion. Dong Chedi released a test video on October 8 this year about the MyExtro V800, a luxury minivan developed by Huawei and JAC Motors. The MyExtro V800 costs roughly $140,000. Dong Che-di said the brake pedal brackets broke on all three new vehicles during emergency braking tests from 62 mph to a stop. The incident sparked major controversy. Videos were later removed, and accounts faced restrictions. State media subsequently defended Huawei, questioning the platform's testing standards and whether it was chasing online traffic. The Shanxi crash and fire sparked another public outcry, followed by another effort by Huawei to silence discussion. Several media and independent accounts that posted Aito crash videos have had their visibility restricted or been muted. The largest media account among them was Sohu Auto. It reported the crash on October 21st and launched an online discussion topic. The next day, its account on Weibo announced a 15-day break due to circumstances. Online accounts said Weibo had muted Sohu Auto for covering the fire. Criticism of Aito extends beyond serious crashes to its everyday after-sales service. An Aito owner said on October 22nd that a rep at the Aito Customer Care Center stopped responding during a call about an after-sales problem. The owner repeatedly asked for a response, but the line remained silent. Look at how efficiently Aito handles problems. Now they just stop talking when there's an issue. Customer service has gone completely silent. Are you there? Hello? It's okay. The call is still connected. It's connected. Let's see how she handles it. One user posted comparison images, saying this was something every Aito owner had to go through. Aito owners report a range of problems. Some say their cars had defects when they were brand new. I just picked up this new Huawei car, and the reading light is already broken. I contacted the salesperson, who said they could compensate me. I'm not sure what to ask for. Any suggestions? Public records on Chinese auto complaint platform Chezhuang show that many Aito M9 owners have recently reported problems. A September 29 complaint about a 2024 extended-range ultra model listed peeling paint in several places, interior damage, and unusual noises in a new vehicle. Another complaint, registered September 30th for the same version, said the right rear door handle would not extend. Other complaints included failed suspension height adjustment, uneven tire wear, and driver assistance malfunctions. A video circulating late September this year said an engineer at CATL headquarters died after crashing an Ito M8 because the doors wouldn't open. The Ito M8 uses batteries made by CATL. One vlogger commented, the MyExtro V800 brake pedal failure still hasn't been resolved, and now an Aito M9 has crashed. The car was destroyed, and someone died. I think Huawei should stop making cars. It developed three luxury cars in one year, rushing them to market. That doesn't inspire confidence in quality. Established automakers have a century of experience, built partly on lessons from countless crashes. Huawei is jumping straight in. Faulty electronics may cost you money. A badly built car can cost you your life. Focus on chips and telecommunications. Taking any of those technologies far ahead of the competition would be a better use of its efforts than making cars.