Xiaomi SU7 almost ends up in a pond while trying to park itself.

Xiaomi SU7 has landed into trouble around its autonomous parking feature, as a video is surfacing online where the high-performance electric sedan was almost rolled into a pond. 

The video clip, which was shared on Chinese social media, captures the car engaged in autonomous parking mode coming forward, just after the occupants came out, and thus finally coming to a stop when its bumper made contact with the water. 

The car was completely on autonomous mode and was parking itself when this incident occurred. However, the majority of reactions online are blaming the driver’s decision to activate the feature near the water body, as majority of the people are questioning the system’s capabilities which are strictly according to the structured parking lots rather than unconventional open water source.

Xiaomi SU7 Autonomous Parking OTA Update

This near-miss has come days after Xiaomi rolled out a winter OTA update, HyperOS 1.11.0, on November 26. The update was specifically for the SU7 and included changes to parking assistance, remote parking, and parking position detection. According to Xiaomi, this update was optimisations which specifically enhanced the overall performance of its parking capabilities. 

As per various Industry engineers, the autonomous parking feature is heavily dependent on driver’s inputs and basically helps in assisting and are vulnerable to perform errors in typical environments. 

Thus features like automated space recognition are heavily dependent on defined contours, kerbs, and structured surroundings. Surfaces such as water, uneven terrains, or open grasslands lack the geometry to be understood by sensors. 

Video Link - Xiaomi SU7’s front bumper takes a swim during autonomous parking

However, in this case, the SU7 came into an abrupt stop after detecting an unexpected object and irregular reading, which led to an emergency stop. This incident has ignited various concerns by SU7 owners, who are reporting inconsistent behaviour while engaging autonomous parking. 

These issues in maintaining alignment specifically in tight spots are leading to abrupt stoppages during valet parking. However, Xiaomi has previously fixed these problems and also covered repairs that occurred in the cases which involved software-related issues.