Images of cars on fire spread quickly on the Chinese Internet: On April 26, a Q7 electric sport-utility vehicle controlled by an advanced driver-assistance system crashed on a highway in Shanxi.

One woman, who said she lost her husband, brother and son in the accident, posted videos online demanding an investigation. Her posts quickly disappeared and she said she would not speak about the issue again.

A Chinese business media outlet published a lengthy investigative report online questioning the safety of assisted driving systems, but that article soon disappeared as well.

For nine days after the crash, there was no coverage in state media. Then they released a statement from the Chinese brand, Wenjie, denying responsibility for the accident. The statement said the vehicle’s automatic braking system worked up to 85 kilometers per hour, but the car was traveling at 115 kilometers per hour when it rear-ended a road maintenance vehicle.

A similar crash would likely draw considerable attention and possible government or legal scrutiny if it happened in the United States, where several major companies using computer-assisted driving technology — Tesla, Waymo and Cruise — have been the subject of high-profile safety investigations.

Waymo, originally Google’s self-driving unit, has been testing driverless cars in Phoenix but has faced scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Transportation. GM has resumed testing its Cruise robotaxis in Phoenix after one of its taxis towed a pedestrian who was hit by a human-driven car in its path in San Francisco.

“The development environment of my country’s autonomous driving industry is becoming increasingly sound, which provides the possibility for the application of autonomous driving vehicles in the field of transportation services,” Wang Xianjin, deputy director of the Ministry of Transport’s Science and Technology Research Institute, told the official Xinhua News Agency.

The government has not released statistics on safety incidents involving self-driving cars or advanced driver-assistance technologies, such as those that automatically change lanes and avoid obstacles on highways. Chinese auto executives say the technologies are safe.

Baidu, a tech giant that works with automakers, is testing its own fleet of driverless taxis in Wuhan.

Wang Yunpeng, president of Baidu’s intelligent driving group, said in a speech: “Minor scratches and bruises are inevitable, but there have been no major casualties.”

During two days last month in Wuhan, I took six rides in Baidu’s robot taxis. During one of those trips, an autonomous taxi without a safety driver slowed to a near stop amid fast-moving traffic on the upper highway level of a Yangtze River bridge.

The car was trying to merge from the center lane to the right lane for the exit ahead. The driver of a blue car in the right lane behind me began to slow down to let my car cut in. But my car was also slowing down. It began to honk automatically to show courtesy instead of speeding into the adjacent lane. Both cars slowed down until they were almost stopped.

The third car bypassed our two cars at highway speed. Finally, the robot taxi slowly inserted itself into the right lane in front of the blue car, then accelerated and exited the bridge from the next exit as planned.

I asked Baidu if it could look into what might have gone wrong. A spokeswoman said the incident was an unusual circumstance, and that drivers in Wuhan were rarely so willing to give way. She said the company would study the incident and consider whether to adjust the algorithms that control its self-driving cars.

Many drivers in Wuhan do drive pretty aggressively. When I saw another robotaxi stop at a crosswalk to let pedestrians cross the road, many drivers honked their horns impatiently.

A year ago in Suzhou, I took a 10-minute ride in a robot taxi operated by a Chinese startup. The taxi braked three times for no apparent reason. Although my colleague and I leaned forward, we were restrained by our seatbelts and no one was injured.

A safety driver in the car with us explained that the carefully programmed software mistakenly identified a pedestrian or a parked car as about to enter the car’s lane.

Many government agencies and other institutions claim a role in the development of self-driving cars. But no single agency has direct regulatory responsibility for transportation safety.

Chinese companies have done extensive experiments to collect data on how self-driving cars interact with pedestrians, which far outnumber most U.S. cities. At a former steel plant turned park in northwest Beijing, Baidu is conducting a three-year trial of robot taxis navigating slowly and carefully through crowds.

Last December, an interdepartmental working group led by the Department of Transportation set out some broad safety rules. Most robotaxis will no longer be required to have safety drivers, but will have to have one remote operator for every three vehicles. The working group delayed more detailed rulemaking until early 2026.

Companies are trying to make as much progress as possible before the deadline in order to influence the final rulemaking. Whoever develops the most used system will reap the rich rewards.

The cost of assisted driving and unmanned driving systems lies mainly in development, not manufacturing. Whoever sells more can spread the development costs.

However, safety issues persist in China. On June 7, a Hainan news outlet posted an article at the top of its website describing an incident in which a Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan equipped with an advanced driver assistance system appeared to accelerate out of control, causing one death and three injuries. Within three hours, the article ranked fourth among the most viewed news in the country.

Xiaomi quickly issued a statement saying there was nothing wrong with the vehicle involved in the accident. The article suggesting otherwise subsequently disappeared from the Chinese Internet, save for a few screenshots by Internet users.