Chinese authorities have asked Tesla to provide data for a crash investigation, a few days after a furious female owner climbed atop a car in protest at a China’s premier annual auto exhibition earlier this week.
Why it matters: For the first time China will officially investigate complaints about Tesla brake failures. Tesla owners in both the United States and China have complained about faulty brakes for years. So far, however, safety regulators have not found evidence for these claims. The company’s reputation in China has suffered in the past year as customers allege safety defects and shady sales practices.
READ MORE: Safety questions and shady sales tactics are chilling the China-Tesla love affair
Details: A branch of the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), China’s top market regulator, in the central province of Henan, on Wednesday ordered Tesla to share “the full range of data” about a crash two months ago to aid its investigation. The owner of the Tesla Model 3 involved, a woman identified only by the surname Zhang, staged a widely publicized protest at Auto Shanghai on Monday. Regulators told Tesla to send the data to the owner “as soon as possible,” according to a Chinese media report (our translation).
Ge Weihua, a customer service manager at Tesla’s regional office in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, told state television channel CCTV on Thursday that the company’s head office had prepared the relevant data and the local office would share it with Zhang by 6 p.m. Beijing time.
Zhang, accompanied by two other female Tesla owners, staged a protest Monday on the opening day of this year’s Shanghai Auto Show, alleging that the brakes on her sedan malfunctioned while her father was driving in Anyang, Henan, in February, causing a crash with another vehicle. The protest was widely reported in Chinese media, with many online commentators siding with the customer.
Tesla responded later that day that the accident was due to excessive speed. Grace Tao, Tesla’s vice president of external affairs in China, told local media that “there is no possibility Tesla will compromise,” Reuters reported.
On Tuesday, national market regulators publicly instructed local market watchdogs in Henan province and Shanghai, where Tesla’s production facility is located, to protect consumers’ legal rights. Later the same day, the company issued an apology (in Chinese) for being slow to respond to the complaint.
In an additional statement, published late Wednesday on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, the US automaker requested Zhengzhou authorities appoint an officially recognized testing agency for the investigation and pledged to “accept the result whatever it might be” (our translation).