Recently, in China, incidents of electric cars catching fire or losing control while driving have been happening from time to time. Most recently, the Chinese electric car giants Xiaomi and BYD have been exposed for using low-quality chips of smartphone-grade. Experts believe that allowing electric vehicles in China to use smartphone chips reflects collusion between the government and businesses, disregarding product safety and the safety of the people.
On June 25th, Xiaomi’s first SUV model YU7 was officially unveiled.
At a new product launch event over a month ago, Xiaomi Group showcased that the cabin SoC chip of its YU7 model is the “third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform” and “manufactured at 4 nanometers”.
However, industry insiders pointed out that Xiaomi’s YU7 cabin chip is actually a “consumer-grade chip”, designed for use in smartphones or gaming devices, rather than the “auto-grade chip” that should be used in cars.
The main difference between these two is that the working temperature range of a “consumer-grade chip” is 0℃ to 70℃, with a design life of 3 to 4 years, while an “auto-grade chip” ranges from minus 40℃ to plus 105℃, with a working life of 15 years.
It is reported that Xiaomi replaced the cabin chip from the mainstream auto-grade “Snapdragon 8295” produced by Qualcomm in the United States to the so-called “third-generation Snapdragon 8”, reducing the unit price from nearly 900 dollars to about 160 dollars.
In addition to Xiaomi YU7, the high-end model “Panthère de Formule” of China’s first electric car brand BYD was also exposed for not using Qualcomm’s auto-grade chip. Its “self-developed” BYD9000 intelligent cabin chip is also considered a consumer-grade chip by the industry.
According to the latest news reported on June 25, a cargo ship “Morning Midas” of Monaco Shipping Company ZM (Zodiac Maritime), loaded with 3,000 Chinese-made cars and electric vehicles, departed from Yantai Port in Shandong on May 26 and was scheduled to arrive in Mexico on June 15. However, on June 3, while sailing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the cargo ship caught fire uncontrollable and completely sunk on the 23rd. All crew members abandoned ship and survived.
The preliminary investigation results from ZM and the US Coast Guard showed that the earliest smoke from the fire came from the deck loaded with electric vehicles.
On the night of June 11, a traffic accident occurred in Zhengzhou involving a Xiaomi SU7 electric car colliding with 16 vehicles. Officials reported injuries, but no fatalities.
The most tragic incident occurred on the night of March 29 when a Xiaomi SU7 crashed into the guardrail on the De Shang Expressway in Tongling, Anhui, caught fire, and three female college students inside seemed to have lost their lives due to being unable to escape because they couldn’t open the car doors.
Su Zi-yun, the director of the Strategic and Resource Department of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Studies, told the Epoch Times reporter that even for consumer-grade chips, the quality produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is “far superior” to its competitors.
“The TSMC chips used in smartphones are more energy-efficient and do not heat up, which involves the maturity of the chip manufacturing process itself,” he explained. However, chips from other competitors tend to heat up, causing batteries to puncture surrounding circuits. “If the chip heats up, the firmware control will order the chip to reduce load, performance, resulting in a significant decrease, while also consuming more power, and that’s just for a phone.”
“Firmware” in mainland China is called “固件” (Firmware), which is embedded microcode in hardware devices to help hardware operate efficiently.
Su Zi-yun stated that functions like intelligent driving in electric vehicles rely heavily on computing power. If consumer-grade chips are used, the performance may be constantly unstable, posing a threat to the safety of the vehicle’s operation.
He pointed out that the technical instability of China’s chip industry means that Chinese electric vehicles “cannot break through in core chip technology, which naturally leads to stability issues in various downstream industries.”
“Imagine that whether it’s Xiaomi or BYD’s cars, under extreme working conditions, the chips may fail. If the chip fails, the driver may lose control, or the vehicle’s autonomous driving system malfunctions, which is very frightening,” Su Zi-yun said.
He further explained that it’s like using a small engine to power a large vehicle. “You can imagine it as a car with a 1,000cc engine carrying an 800kg shell, it’s okay to drive, but if you use a 1,000cc engine to carry a 2,000kg vehicle, climbing will become laborious, and the engine is more likely to wear out.”
Su Zi-yun further explained that electric vehicle fires are related to the reliability and stability of the chips. Since most electric vehicle batteries are lithium batteries, their charging and discharging are managed by the Battery Management System (BMS). When chip performance is unstable, the BMS could fail, causing the batteries to over-discharge, leading to vehicle fires.
Regarding the issue of electric vehicle doors not opening, Su emphasized that this involves chip problems and poorly designed safety features.
He noted that when designing car models, electric vehicle manufacturers may not consider “redundant backup systems”, meaning that in case an automatic device malfunctions, there should be manual options to open the doors, among other functions.
After the fatal accident involving a Xiaomi SU7 on March 29, the relatives of the deceased criticized Xiaomi’s vehicles, asking why they would launch “immature products that harm people?”
In response, Xiaomi Automotive stated that all four doors of the SU7 are equipped with “emergency mechanical handles” and that in a power outage situation, “the doors can still be opened normally.”
Su Zi-yun pointed out that some car manufacturers, for the sake of aesthetics, may design the manual door handles relatively hidden, which in an emergency, as in the unfortunate incident involving the three female students, finding the manual door opener under pressure may be challenging.
“The worst scenario is when everything is fully automated and there is no manual choice. That’s why in car design, sometimes the front doors are power windows but the rear doors still have manual handles, considering that if the vehicle falls into the water and the circuits fail, making it impossible to lower the power windows, at least lowering the windows from the rear doors manually provides an exit route. This is what we mean by ‘redundant backup’,” Su Zi-yun elaborated.
Su Zi-yun believes that the use of low-quality consumer-grade chips in Chinese electric vehicles reflects that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the industry have lost corporate responsibility. With chip instability, they still aim to elevate the vehicle’s performance beyond the safety benchmarks set by the chips.
Professor Xie Tian from the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina told the Epoch Times that the CCP may be concerned that the US could potentially sanction chips used in cars in the future. Hence, to maintain the continuity of production and operation of their electric vehicles, they opt for so-called self-developed chips with lower quality that only reach consumer-grade levels, thus naturally posing safety risks.
Su Zi-yun said: “They want to do something similar to Mao Zedong’s ‘backyard steelmaking’. They want to do ‘backyard chipmaking’ now, but the technology is not ready, and they over-leverage their technological prowess. Naturally, this mismatch results in safety issues.”
He mentioned that if it involved aviation chips, it would be even worse. Aircraft fly at high altitudes of thousands of meters, and in addition to temperature issues, there are cosmic radiation issues. “If the chip itself is not up to par, it’s easy to be penetrated by cosmic radiation. Coupled with inadequate packaging technology, cosmic radiation continuously hits the chips, which may further cause circuit failure.”
Xie Tian pointed out that large Chinese automakers or major capital investments in China are closely linked to the senior CCP officials. “They can find ways to smooth things out so that what they want to do can go smoothly. As for people’s lives or safety, basically, it’s irrelevant.”
Su Zi-yun believes that this is a result of “collusion between officials and businesses within the abnormal human regime of the CCP, and also for the sake of publicity.”
However, when negative events occur, Xie Tian said that the CCP will suppress them repeatedly to prevent reports of vehicle fires or accidents from coming out. This way, the car manufacturers can still survive.
“The use of consumer-grade chips brings safety hazards, which the CCP authorities are not concerned about. The CCP is basically a ruling group that is hostile to the people. In reality, it has never cared about the lives of the Chinese people, from history to today.,” Xie Tian concluded.