(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) On October 8, the automotive content platform Dianchedi released a test video of the Zunjie V800. The video shows that the brake pedal brackets of three new cars broke one after another during the emergency braking test at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The similarity of the three failures raises questions about the vehicle's design, component strength and production quality. This quality turmoil also evolved into a controversy about public opinion control and patriotism brand image.
On Thursday (October 15), China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the State Administration for Market Regulation established a joint investigation team to investigate the breakage of the brake pedal bracket of the Zunjie V800, and will announce the results of the investigation in due course. Zunjie later stated on social media that it would fully cooperate with the investigation. As of press time, Zunjie has not yet submitted a recall application to the market regulatory authorities.
Prior to this, Zunjie issued a statement to car owners on Tuesday (October 13) and announced the test report of the China Automotive Engineering Research Institute (China Automotive Research Institute): the brake pedal submitted for inspection complied with the industry standard QC/T 788-2018 under a longitudinal force of 1,500 N, and no cracks or damage were found when the force was gradually tightened to 3,000 N. Zunjie also said that it will upgrade the brake pedal free of charge for owners of delivered cars in November, calling this a "proactive upgrade" rather than a recall.
But the report was quickly questioned. According to a report in the "What's Worth Buying" community, China Automotive Research Institute's client was JAC Motors, which tested a total of 14 brake pedal assemblies with loading forces ranging from 2,000 N to 3,000 N, but only 2 actually reached 3,000 N. The test adopts static loading on the bench at a speed of about 20 mm per minute. China Automotive Research Institute also stated that the report is only responsible for the samples submitted for inspection and "does not make any guarantee" for the company's subsequent mass-produced products.
On Wednesday (October 14), "Understanding Car Emperor's Vision" released another video, pointing out that "out of 14 tightened samples, only 2 measured 3,000 N." According to the report of 'What's Worth Buying', Takeo Dongmen, the person in charge of the test of Dongmen Chedi, also pointed out that the permanent deformation of one of the samples under 1,500 N has reached 4.07 mm, close to the upper limit of 5 mm, and this is a carefully selected sample. The car expert emphasized that in fact, the car test was a dynamic working condition of continuous heavy braking. The measured peak pedal force when the pedal broke was 1,612 N, which was much lower than the 3,000 N in the bench report; the static loading speed was about a thousand times slower than real emergency braking, and the two results cannot be directly converted.
Zunjie is the highest-positioned brand under Huawei-led Hongmeng Zhixing. Zunjie V800 was jointly developed by Huawei and Jianghuai Automobile. It was launched on August 5 with a price of 766,000 to 1.016 million yuan. Top-end models and options cost nearly 1.2 million yuan. It was called "the most expensive domestic MPV" by the media. Huawei Managing Director Yu Chengdong once said that this is "definitely the top MPV in the world."
According to CnEVPost, a tester who understands Chedi said that after the pedal bracket broke, the brake pedal could not be used normally, and the car could only be stopped by using the parking button to activate emergency braking. The fracture locations and failure modes of the three vehicles were highly similar, and public opinion generally believed that this was no accident, but a design or quality issue. On the day the test video was released, JAC’s stock price fell by the limit.
Zunjie initially responded that its braking system was developed in accordance with the requirements of "higher than national standards and higher than industry standards" and that no breakage has occurred in actual use by users since delivery. It also called the test of Dianchedi "non-standard extreme test conditions", but it still stated that it would optimize the component design. The car expert immediately retorted that braking at 100 kilometers is the most basic test subject and does not belong to extreme working conditions.
The incident also affected the entire industry. On Saturday (October 10), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and the State Administration for Market Regulation, issued a draft for comments, intending to rectify "crash cars" and strengthen the innovative design and R&D testing verification management of automotive products. The document proposes that the reliability verification test mileage of newly applied products should be no less than 30,000 kilometers, and the environmental adaptability verification must include "two winters and one summer."
What is more concerning than the broken pedal is the disappearance of the test video. According to reports, the test video of Dianchedi cannot be viewed normally on multiple platforms starting from October 9, and some pages indicate that the content "involves violations." Corporate statements posted by Xinhuanet on Weibo were also deleted.
Control also extends to ordinary users and local official accounts. A Douyin user stepped on a metal flush valve in the bathroom and captioned it, "A metal brake pedal used in toilet water valves." Then his avatar and username disappeared. The official public account "Xinjiang Release" published a comment on "Can we speak human language in response to product safety issues?" It was deleted after reading more than 100,000 times. Some netizens reported that Huawei’s Hongmeng system phones were unable to display this evaluation video, but this statement could not be confirmed.
At the same time, various arguments in defense of Zunjie appeared on the Internet: some said that the tester stepped too hard, and the maximum pedaling force of ordinary people did not exceed 400 N; some said that the car expert used liquid nitrogen to freeze the pedal; some said that the tester was Japanese and was a "foreign force" destroying domestic brands; and some called for "giving the national industry some time."
The joint investigation team includes the Cyberspace Administration of China. A commentary article titled "The real person under investigation is the car expert", questioning that the investigation may be aimed at the platform that released the test, not just the car company involved.
As the test video cannot be viewed normally on multiple platforms, part of the discussion extends from the safety of the vehicle itself to Huawei's brand image, corporate public relations, platform content management and consumer evaluation rights. Comments collected by China Digital Times, a website that records online public opinion and online censorship, show that some authors viewed the incident as a case to discuss the relationship between brand halo and public oversight.
Some commentators believe that since Meng Wanzhou returned to China, Huawei has almost become a "religious brand" with the blessing of patriotism and nationalism, gradually becoming "flashy and doing whatever it wants", and is good at "if there is a problem, solve the problem first." But this time the question was raised on an authoritative platform with tens of millions of fans, and the usual methods were unlikely to work.
Many netizens' sarcasm went straight to the point: "No country or car company will let a car with a broken brake pedal be put on the market. But in China, such a car can sell for millions, and it claims to be far ahead." Others reminded that brands can be deified, public opinion can be manipulated, and voices can be silenced, but brake defects can really kill people.
Some netizens lamented that nowadays Chinese people no longer even have the space to freely comment on a car; some people called for "don't buy products that are not allowed to be evaluated, and don't touch brands that are not allowed to be questioned." Some netizens used the topic to compare the entire society to a "Huawei brand car": when they accelerated crazily towards the cliff, they slammed on the brakes, only to find that the brakes had already failed.
