Beijing has approved new regulations governing autonomous vehicles, set to take effect on April 1, 2025. The regulations, which were passed by the Standing Committee of Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, cover areas such as infrastructure planning and construction, on-road traffic management and safety assurance, providing a clear regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles equipped with Level 3 and higher systems.
The new regulations are based on the operational experiences from earlier testing and introduce an annual inspection system for autonomous vehicles running in the city.
“Traditional vehicle inspections lack coverage for intelligent systems,” explained Hu Fangfang, director of the automobile testing department of the Beijing Products Quality Supervision and Inspection Institute, during a press conference. “The new evaluation framework will further ensure the safety of these vehicles.”
According to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, the regulations set out the legal responsibilities related to failure to perform routine maintenance and inspections on operational vehicles, along with stipulations of penalties for other violations, such as “unauthorized use of autonomous vehicles for road testing without approval”; and “non-compliance in appointing qualified safety operators or platform safety monitors”.
In recent years, Beijing has emerged as a national leader in autonomous vehicle development. Since the launch of China’s first high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone in September 2020, the city has successfully developed intelligent infrastructure across 600km2 . The demonstration zone has issued road test permits to 33 companies, covering nearly 900 vehicles with a combined autonomous driving test mileage of over 32,000,000km, accounting for over a quarter of the total national autonomous test mileage. Beijing is also home to leading companies in the field, including Baidu, Pony.ai and Neolix.
By the end of August 2024, Chinese public security authorities had issued 16,000 test licenses for autonomous vehicles, with some 32,000km of roads across the country opened for autonomous vehicle testing, according to the Ministry of Public Security.