Passenger dies after crash vehicle's doors lock
Provided by Jimu News.
One person died and two injured in a car accident, after which all four doors of the LEXUS LM locked, and a fire broke out.
The accident happened on Thursday on an expressway in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
The doors failed to unlock after the front airbags had been released, it has been reported, leading to questions on the Internet about possible design defects in the luxury vehicle.
LEXUS China said in a statement on Weibo (China's equivalent to Twitter) on Friday that it had paid great attention to the issue and had dispatched an emergency response team to work with the local auto dealer to assist in the investigation by local traffic police.
It also passed on its sincere concerns to the people and their family involved in the accident.
The accident happened around noon after the vehicle crashed into corrugated guardrails and cement piers on a section of the G7212 Quanzhou-Nanning Expressway in Guigang city.
Truck drivers come to the rescue.
A female passenger is pulled from the vehicle.
A video shows truck drivers broke a door to rescue the driver and pulled the front-seat passenger out through a window.
However, the remaining passenger had fainted on the back seat with her legs stuck, when a fire broke out.
Another video shows the vehicle engulfed in flames.
The two who were rescued suffered slight injuries. The cause is still under investigation.
The LEXUS LM, a petrol-electric hybrid model, hit the Chinese market in February 2020. The popular four-seat model is priced at more than 2 million yuan (US$297,000). The LM model is sold mainly in the Chinese market and some other Asian markets.
The heated online debate centered on two questions: why the vehicle failed to unlock after the airbags being released; and why the vehicle burst into fire when its main structure remained relatively intact.
According to the model's user guide, all the doors are designed to unlock if the Supplement Restraint System (SRS) air bag is deployed or a major crash occurs.
But the guide also indicates the function may fail depending on the intensity of the crash or in some other conditions that are not specified.
