Nio under scrutiny after car accident kills two

Chinese electric carmaker Nio has been caught up in public scrutiny over an accident in Shanghai which the company said has nothing to do with the car itself.

On Wednesday afternoon, one Nio test vehicle fell from the third floor of an office building in the Auto Innovation Park in Jiading district, killing the two people inside.

Videos of firefighters trying to rescue people from the sedan been have circulating on social media platform Sina Weibo since then, and judging from the car's features in the pictures, the vehicle being tested was likely to be Nio ET5/7 model series.

The ET5 model was put on the market in December, while the first batch of ET7 models was delivered to customers in March.

The company issued a notice on Thursday evening which confirmed the accident and the deaths of two in-car testers — one is an employee with Nio and the other is an employee with a partner company.

"The company was deeply grieved over the accident and has sent condolence to the families of the deceased. We have formed a special team to help them deal with the aftermath," Nio said on its official account on Sina Weibo.

"We have immediately assisted the police in the investigation into the cause of the accident. Based on preliminary analysis, we deemed that the accident has nothing to do with the vehicle itself," it said.

The last part of the statement, though, later being edited to: "it was an accident (which was not caused by the vehicle)", drew an online backlash.

The post has got more than 2,300 replies as of Friday, and many said it showed that Nio has little empathy toward the dead and is more concerned about the sales of the car.

In a reply to inquiries from Jinan Times on Thursday, one salesman of the company in Jinan, Shandong province, said the accident was caused by the testers mistakenly hanging a wrong gear.

Lin Liangning, a lawyer, said whether the case was purely an accident or it was caused by the vehicle should be left to authorities to investigate.

"The company itself doesn't has the right to give any conclusion to a case involving human casualty," he said.

Nio did not respond to a request from China Daily for further details about the incident as of press time.

Founded in 2014, Nio was headquartered in Hefei, Anhui province, and has become one of the leading domestic electric carmakers in recent years. It delivered more than 90,000 electric cars in China in 2021.