AITO Blames Speeding for a Fatal M9 Crash, but Weibo Questions the Speed Data

The crash happened on the night of October 17 in Shenmu, a coal city in Yulin, northern Shaanxi. A white AITO M9 — the flagship SUV of the brand Huawei co-launches with Seres — struck a traffic-light pole at an intersection and caught fire within seconds. Police in Shenmu have confirmed it was a single-vehicle accident: the driver, the only person in the car, did not survive.

For a week the questions outpaced the answers. Then, on October 21, AITO's user-service account issued the company's first full statement: the car was being driven manually at the time, was travelling at 139.1 km/h where the limit is 50 km/h, hit the square base of a traffic-light pole, and the fire began with a short circuit and a fluid leak caused by the impact. The statement was pointed about what it said did not happen — this was not a battery catching fire on its own.

That reading has not settled the matter, because a second set of numbers is circulating. A post by a doctor who reviews crash footage, liked nearly 3,000 times, walks through the widely shared video frame by frame: crossing the pedestrian crossing shortly before the intersection, the car was doing roughly 75 km/h; by the moment of impact, the poster estimates, it had braked to somewhere between 20 and 30 km/h — a long braking distance that left no time to swerve, but nothing like 139. "If the backend really recorded 139 km/h at that intersection, the error is too large," the post reads. "Is there another reason the calculation is wrong? If there is, the motive would be terrifying."

The dispute has outlived Weibo. On Zhihu, one of the day's most-followed questions asks what the car's actual speed could have been, and why the speed at the moment of collision was not in the published data. The arithmetic began before the statement: as we covered earlier this week, Weibo users had already derived the crash speed from the video and found it nowhere near the official figure.

Others have urged restraint. One widely forwarded post recalled a June incident in Taizhou, Zhejiang, in which a fallen metal part wedged under a car's chassis and dragged until the vehicle caught fire — a case officials ruled was not a vehicle defect — and warned readers not to speculate before the traffic police, the fire authorities and the automaker publish their findings.

A fire after a crash is the most sensitive failure an electric-vehicle brand in China can face. Buyer anxiety about battery fires is the industry's standing wound, and every statement a carmaker publishes is read as a defence brief. AITO, as the brand Huawei's car ambitions ride on, has more at stake than most — the two companies signed a new five-year cooperation deal at the start of the month. The full investigation has not yet been published. When it is, the number everyone will read first is the speed.