The confrontation between a female owner and Tesla showcases a new problem facing China's fast-growing new energy vehicle industry, and experts are beginning to call for stronger regulations.

The Securities Times on Friday cited an industry insider who did not want to be named as saying that autonomous driving technology is developing so fast that it is normal for laws and regulations to lag behind the development of the technology. When the new technology continues to iterate, laws and regulations and supervision should also speed up the pace and adjust in due course.

On April 19, at the Tesla booth at the Shanghai auto show, a female owner wearing a T-shirt with the words translated as "Brake Failure" stood on top of a car in protest, causing widespread concern. She was then forcibly carried out by staff and detained for five days for disturbing public order.

In the afternoon of April 22, Tesla released to the media the driving data of the car one minute before the accident and made a written explanation. But this move was challenged by the owner's family, saying that privacy was violated.

The Securities Times quoted Cao Guangping, an independent commentator on the new energy vehicle industry, as saying that with the development of the automobile, Internet, and big data industries, all industries need a set of regulations on data management, especially for some new situations, new trends and new difficulties to be studied systematically.

In April, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued a draft of management guidelines for the cybersecurity of smart cars to solicit public opinion.

According to the requirements of this document, smart connected cars should have event data recording and automatic driving data storage to ensure the integrity of the data recorded by the device in the event of a vehicle accident.

In March this year, China released the "Road Traffic Safety Law (Revised Draft)", which also put forward requirements for self-driving car products, including self-driving cars must have a data recording system similar to the "black box" of an aircraft, and a complete record of event data and various aspects of self-driving data.

The Securities Times quoted Wang Yao, assistant secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, as saying that Tesla's farce had sounded an alarm to the industry.

Wang suggested that government departments could revise and supplement regulations and standards that are not adapted to the needs of the development of smart connected cars for the different types of data involved in smart cars, and suggested improving the data regulatory system by adopting a polycentric data governance model.

(Source: CnEVPost)