A test car made by Chinese electric vehicle start-up Nio fell out of a third-floor parking lot of a building in Shanghai, killing two people, the company said in a Weibo post on Thursday.
The incident happened at around 5:20 p.m. Beijing time on Wednesday. One company staff member and a partner employee died.
Nio said it immediately started an investigation into the accident in co-operation with the public security department.
Nio laid out these details in a post on China’s Twitter-like service Weibo which was deleted just minutes after it was posted. The Weibo post was shared with CNBC by one of Nio’s public relations officers. The company then posted a new statement on Weibo which was very similar to the initial one.
The company said after an on-site analysis, it can be preliminarily confirmed that the accident has nothing to do with the vehicle itself. In the new Weibo post, the company emphasized that the incident was an “accident” that was not caused by issues with the vehicle.
Nio did not respond to a request for further details about the incident or why the initial tweet was deleted when contacted by CNBC.
Videos circulating online show medical workers trying to rescue the two passengers in the car.
Nio said that it has set up a special team to help the families of the deceased deal with the aftermath.
Last year, a man died in a Nio ES8 while using the car’s semi-autonomous driving features known as Navigate on Pilot.