On March 29, 2025, at approximately 10:44 p.m. local time, three female university students were killed when a Xiaomi SU7 Standard electric car struck a concrete barrier on the Deshang Expressway in Anhui Province, eastern China. The collision occurred on a section under road works, where barriers closed the car's normal lane and traffic had been redirected toward a contraflow arrangement. The car subsequently caught fire. Local officials in the Tongling area confirmed that three people died, and Xiaomi publicly released a detailed timestamped account of the system's status shortly before impact.
Manufacturer-confirmed supervised driving mode
Xiaomi's April 1, 2025 statement said its Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) driving-assistance function was active while the vehicle was traveling at approximately 116 km/h. The manufacturer reported a prior mild driver-distraction alert and a hands-on-wheel warning. At 22:44:24 the system reportedly recognized an obstacle, warned the driver and began requesting deceleration. At 22:44:25 the driver took control, with a recorded steering input and braking. The vehicle struck the concrete barrier between roughly 22:44:26 and 22:44:28. Xiaomi said the last confirmed speed before impact was about 97 km/h. These are company-provided telemetry excerpts, not a full independent regulator's crash reconstruction.
The critical handover interval
The reported interval between obstacle warning and collision was approximately two to four seconds, with only one to three seconds between manual takeover and impact. The bereaved families questioned whether the timing gave a human a realistic opportunity to respond to the unexpected diversion. Xiaomi said its system did warn and brake and maintained that police should complete the investigation. The relative roles of construction-site layout, system sensing and prediction, warning timing, speed and human responses remain open technical issues. It is not justified to describe the driver-assistance system as fully autonomous or to assert that it alone caused the deaths.
Investigation, emergency calls and vehicle fire
The company stated that its automated emergency call was triggered and that it cooperated with police, providing driving and system records by March 31. Chinese reporting quoted Tongling authorities as saying a working group or dedicated investigation team had been created. Relatives raised questions about fire behavior and access to the car following the collision. No complete publicly authenticated battery-fire, door-release or forensic medical report was located in the cited accounts, so this dossier does not assign a definitive death mechanism to either the crash impact or subsequent fire.
Evidence strength and opposing interpretations
The strongest system-specific evidence is Xiaomi's own timeline affirming NOA engagement, obstacle detection, warnings, human takeover and speed measurements. The Paper, Xinhua-linked reporting, Jiemian and independent Chinese journalists published and scrutinized those details, while relatives disputed whether the response was safe. Those articles do not amount to an independent technical audit of underlying raw log files. No final public judgment or official probable-cause allocation to the NOA software was identified from the reviewed reporting.
Case count and geographic limits
This single collision caused three human deaths and is recorded as one incident, not three separate vehicle records. Names of the students are not included where reliable full names were not verified. Coordinates locate Tongling approximately in Anhui Province and do not represent the precise highway barrier. The incident is classified as verified driver-assistance operation with disputed contribution to a fatal collision.