Snapshot of the accident. Photo: web 

A car accident involving Lexus, a luxury vehicle division under Japanese automaker Toyota, has sparked safety concerns about the brand among Chinese consumers on Chinese social media after the doors of the car, which was on fire, failed to open automatically.

The accident on Thursday in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region left one person dead and two with non-life-threatening injuries, local police said on Friday. A Lexus customer service staffer told the Global Times on Friday that the company is investigating the case.

In a statement on its official Weibo account on Friday, Lexus China said it attaches great importance to this accident, and it has an emergency response team on the ground to facilitate the investigation.

The accident drew wide attention on Chinese social media, where some questioned the safety of Lexus cars. Online video clips showed that the passengers were trapped in the car for a long time in thick smoke. The doors, which were supposed to unlock after the crash, remained closed and delayed rescue work, domestic news portal thepaper.cn reported.

Some Chinese netizens said that the problem with the doors showed a safety problem in the design of the car.

Zhang Xiang, a research fellow at the Research Center of Automobile Industry Innovation of the North China University of Technology, said that a function that unlocks the doors after a crash is a very simple and common feature in most cars today.

In the case of a collision, the sensor in the car can detect the change of speed and if it exceeds the predetermined value, the system will automatically function, so that the door will be unlocked, Zhang said. "However, nothing is 100 percent guaranteed in real life."

The vehicle in the accident was a Lexus LM 300h, a luxury model that costs 1.16 million yuan ($172,260) to 1.46 million yuan on the Chinese market.

Sales of Lexus cars have slowed in China in recent years. According to public data, from January to June, 86,500 Lexus cars were insured in China, down 29.7 percent year-on-year.

Lexus delivered about 226,116 new vehicles in China in 2021, according to the company, up 1.1 percent from the previous year. That compared with 11 percent growth in 2020.

This isn't the first time that Lexus has sparked security concerns in China.

In April, Toyota Motor (China) Investment Co filed a recall plan with the State Administration for Market Regulation to recall 6,832 imported Lexus vehicles manufactured from March 31, 2021 to March 17, 2022 over a malfunction in internal control procedures that might distract drivers.