Two hardworking heads of celebrity car companies were caught in a contradictory plot before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Snake: "They want to show off their smart driving of black technology while avoiding being banned by the platform."
After Lei Jun's live broadcast room was banned by Douyin at 1:48 pm on January 25, Yu Chengdong, who followed closely, cleverly adopted the method of "delayed live broadcast", with the gray words "non live broadcast" marked in the lower left corner of the screen.
The technological myth of intelligent driving was repeatedly emphasized by the bigwigs during the live broadcast and "delayed live broadcast": "Intelligent driving is more reliable than humans" and "it will never take the wrong road."
During this period, although Yu Chengdong's team embedded safety tips such as "fixed camera shooting" and "pre-recorded content" in the live broadcast screen, some careful netizens found that the time on the central control screen was 7 minutes faster than the actual time, verifying that they were only using technical means to deal with Douyin's rules, and questioned whether the safety guidelines were alienated into a speculative mentality of "anti-blocking strategy" at this time.
Lei Jun's cross-platform experience shows that the attitudes of traffic platforms towards smart driving live streaming are not unified: the same driving behavior is not questioned on Weibo and Video Account, but it is "running aground" on Douyin. So much so that some netizens joked, "It seems that Douyin's rules are currently the biggest stumbling block to the development of smart driving in China."
So, Lei Jun demonstrated the end-to-end intelligent driving of Xiaomi SU7, but netizens easily broke through his safety image with a report button. Li Liang, vice president of Douyin, responded: "The driver needs to concentrate on driving and cannot interact with the live broadcast room", etc., which seemed to wake up the "autonomous driving utopia" carefully built by car companies.
A smart driving live broadcast that started out as a marketing innovation seems to have evolved into a performance art that deconstructs safety ethics. Under the temptation of traffic and technology, what kind of operations actually comply with driving safety rules has sparked discussion.
We believe that the car companies' respect for the bottom line of safety should not give way to the game of traffic. 8.46 million people watched the "live broadcast while driving" scene, which invisibly implanted the wrong perception of "intelligent driving = completely letting go" in their brains. Those bigwigs who shouted "safety is the first principle of car manufacturing" at the press conference turned around and turned public roads into reality show sets in the live broadcast room. This dual value will inevitably erode the seriousness of the automotive industry.
Of course, the development of rules sometimes cannot keep up with the pace of technological progress, but car companies cannot easily pave the way for themselves by saying that "the rules will be modified accordingly after the intelligent driving technology matures."
Games that prioritize traffic above all else will likely end up costing the entire industry.
Those bigwigs who step on the traffic accelerator in the live broadcast room to attract attention may want to think about this: when the entire industry is playing bumper cars on icy roads, the first adventurer who steps on the accelerator often becomes the initial impact point of a chain rear-end collision. His flying bumper fragments are likely to embed into the windshield of every subsequent car.
