Nine automakers recalled 4.27 million cars in China, six of them partly over the air
Nine manufacturers filed recalls covering 4,275,743 vehicles over a hard-to-find emergency door release on a single day, and six of them discharged part of the remedy by rewriting window-control software remotely.
Nine carmakers filed recall plans with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation on August 21 over the same defect, covering 4,275,743 vehicles when the counts in the nine notices are added together.
Each notice described an interior emergency mechanical door release that sits close in color to the surrounding trim and is hard to identify and operate. In a severe crash that disables the vehicle’s low-voltage system, the regulator said, that may impede both escape and rescue from outside.
The counts were Tesla 2,975,910, Xiaomi 390,435, Leapmotor 371,200, XPeng 264,842, Zeekr 92,658, Chery’s electric-vehicle arm 68,488, Dongfeng 53,452, BAIC BluePark Magna 46,850 and FAW 11,908.
Six manufacturers used software for part of the fix. Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Zeekr, Dongfeng and BAIC will each update window-control software remotely to add a strategy that lowers the windows after a crash. Xiaomi went further than the others, saying it would also revise the logic by which the center console releases the doors. XPeng, Chery and FAW filed no software element at all: their remedies are warning labels, and in Chery’s case a replacement cover panel.
The dependency being patched is an architectural one — door egress conditioned on a live low-voltage bus — and in six of the nine cases the patch is a behavioral change in a body-domain function rather than a mechanical part. Start dates ranged from immediate to September 25.