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Courtesy Li Auto
Chinese electric vehicle maker
Li Auto
warned that companies need to adjust how they talk about autonomous driving technology. The warning comes a day
NIO
stock dropped after a fatal accident involving its driver assistance features and after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into accidents involving Tesla’s Autopilot.
“I call on the media and industry bodies to unify the Chinese terminology standard for autonomous driving” said CEO Li Xiang in his WeChat account, according to reports. “Because users can’t understand what L2 and L3 are, which are jargon.”
Li Auto (ticker: LI) wasn’t immediately available to comment on the WeChat statement.
The industry, essentially, defines five levels of autonomous driving going from Level 1 to Level 5.
Level 2, or L2, includes features like lane-keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, and emergency banking. Taken together, the features mean a car can automate many simple driving tasks, but drivers need to be fully engaged even when so-called level 2 systems are active.
All the systems available to buy today on cars are L2 and no more. Level 3, or L3, means drivers can afford not to pay attention in certain situations.
Level 4 and Level 5 systems mean that drivers can pay almost no attention in many situations—the car will do everything in the right conditions.
But with names such as Autopilot and terms such as self-driving, consumers can become confused, believing that the car is more capable than it is.
Tesla
(TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has addressed the issue in prior conference calls.
“We do want to set the expectation that it’s much like the Autopilot in a plane, where you turn the Autopilot on in a plane,” explained Musk in a 2015 conference call. “But the assumed expectation is the pilot will pay attention to what the plane is doing and won’t go to sleep or disappear from the cockpit. So we don’t want to set that expectation with consumers.”
The self-driving features make cars safer, even according to regulators. NHTSA points out that most crashes are due to driver error. But abuse of, or misunderstanding of, the current technology is a new issue for regulators to wrestle with.
Tesla stock dropped 4.3% Monday after NHTSA announced it was looking into 11 crashes involving emergency vehicles and Tesla vehicles with autonomous driving features engaged. Its stock is down 2% in premarket trading Tuesday.
NIO (NIO) stock dropped 5.8% Monday after a fatal crash that appears to have involved NIO’s autonomous driving features. The investigation of that crash is ongoing and NIO says it is cooperating with authorities. Nio stock is down 3% in premarket trading.
In fact, all U.S.-listed Chinese electric vehicle stocks are down Tuesday morning. Li stock 2% in premarket trading. while
XPeng
(XPEV) shares are off 3.8%. Chinese stocks are weak in overseas trading too. The
Shanghai Composite
is down 2% and Hong Kong’s
Hang Seng Index
is down 1.7%.
The overseas weakness is bleeding into the U.S.
S&P 500
and
Dow Jones Industrial Average
futures are off 0.5% and 0.6%, respectively.
Write to allen.root@dowjones.com