Nio’s Electric Car Plunges 3 Floors During Test Drive In Fatal Accident
Last week, two people were testing a Nio electric car in the Chinese automaker’s headquarters in Shanghai when the vehicle plunged three floors to the ground. The two occupants, one of them an employee and the other from a partner company, died.
The third floor (or second floor where we come from) from where the vehicle crash through the wall was said to be a test-drive area, car park or a showroom.
The car appeared to be an ET5, which was unveiled last December as a rival to the Tesla Model 3 in China (for a start) and was expected to arrive at Chinese dealerships in September 2022, although this incident had most likely thrown a spanner in the works.
Nio made a statement via Weibo that “based on the analysis of the situation at the scene, it can be preliminarily confirmed that it was an accident and not related to the vehicle itself.” The statement, however, triggered numerous angry responses (shunning responsibility are we, Nio?); the company eventually amended it and removed the last part.
A Chinese news media did report an employee saying that the driver (without specifying who) had accidentally put the car in forward gear instead of reverse, and the issue was not with the brakes. Nonetheless, it is alarming that the walls were not reinforced to prevent such an incident.
