Early this year, Chinese automakers enthusiastically announced that they would soon be mass-producing and selling self-driving vehicles.
Most of those plans have now been delayed after a deadly crash that drew broad public attention.
China’s regulators finally gave the go-ahead last week to only two of the nine automakers that had submitted plans to sell self-driving cars. And the approvals by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology were narrowly tailored to allow little more than further testing, not mass production.
Beijing Automotive Group and Changan Automobile in Chongqing will be allowed to operate self-driving taxis on three stretches of highway in each company’s hometown, the ministry said, and the taxis will not be allowed to change lanes while under computer control. On any other road, the taxis will need to be under the control of a driver.
The limited programs represent a recognition by the Chinese government that objectives set nearly five years ago, to begin mass production for sale to the general public by the end of this year, were too ambitious.
China’s regulators began to pull back after a crash of a Xiaomi SU7 in late March killed three women, all university students. News of previous accidents involving assisted driving had been suppressed by China’s censors. But news of the crash in March, on a highway in central China’s Anhui Province, spread quickly and widely.
Questions swirled over whether drivers or automakers could be held legally responsible for such crashes.
According to Xiaomi, the car was moving at 72 miles per hour in assisted-driving mode when it detected that its lane had been closed because of construction. The car issued an audible warning: “Please be aware of obstacles ahead.” The driver took control of the vehicle, which crashed one second later into a concrete barrier, according to the company.
The public discussion of the tragedy prompted China’s Ministry of Public Security to get involved. The ministry issued a statement warning that the assisted-driving technology currently available on mass-produced cars in China was not the same as fully automated driving. It warned motorists against having conversations that might distract them.
“The risky behavior of playing with mobile phones, sleeping, chatting and eating after turning on the assisted-driving function not only violates road traffic safety laws and regulations, but also poses serious threat to the safety of other road users,” the ministry said.
Three levels of assisted or driverless technology are being debated in China.
So-called Level 2 technology helps steer the car, but drivers are required to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. This is already widely available in China, including on the SU7 that crashed. But a report aired by state television last summer found that none of the domestic manufacturers’ systems were as reliable as those of Tesla, the American automaker that is popular in China.
Under Level 3 technology, drivers do not need to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, but must be in the driver’s seat and ready to take control of the car.
Level 4 involves robot taxis with no drivers at all; passengers sit in the back seat and may be blocked by a partition from even reaching the empty front seats. More than a dozen Chinese cities, notably Wuhan, are testing robot taxis.
Days before the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved the two limited taxi services for Level 3, Geely Auto, China’s second-largest automaker, had tried to reassure regulators and the Chinese public about traffic safety. On Dec. 12, Geely opened the world’s largest automotive safety testing center in Ningbo.
Jerry Gan, chief executive of Geely, said his company had already begun shipping some of its Zeekr cars with the hardware needed for Level 3 operations. “This represents the highest safety standard for assisted driving for the L3 era,” he said.
China’s state-run television followed the Xiaomi crash with a report in July that was widely viewed on Chinese internet. Tests of Level 2 technology on 36 car models from 20 brands had found that slightly fewer than half the cars could safely avoid a crash when they encountered trucks near a construction site at night, the report stated.
Only the two Tesla models in the test had assisted-driving systems that were reliable in a wide range of safety situations.
Some Chinese automakers, like Geely, were so certain that Level 3 self-driving systems would be approved soon that they had already begun mass-producing cars with the necessary cameras and other equipment. But for now, the cars are being sold with only Level 2 software because of Beijing regulators’ tilt toward greater caution.
Geely, XPeng Motors and Li Auto are among the companies with licenses to continue testing Level 3 cars on roads. But unlike the taxi affiliates of Changan and Beijing Automotive, they do not yet have licenses allowing them to start commercial service with these cars.
“What looked like an imminent L3 rollout was, in hindsight, a marketing-led acceleration running ahead of governance, insurance frameworks and public trust,” said Bill Russo, an electric cars consultant in Shanghai.
The government’s decision on taxi services, he added, “formalizes a pause — not to stop progress, but to slow it down, narrow the scope and put guardrails around it.”
Ruoxin Zhang contributed research.
Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.
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