China proposes liability rules for autonomous vehicles
Beijing is treating autonomous driving as mature enough for national liability rules, not just municipal pilots. By Stewart Burnett
China has proposed adding a dedicated chapter on autonomous vehicles to its Road Traffic Safety Law, submitted to the National People’s Congress for initial review on 25 August. Under the plan, automakers would handle traffic violations committed while a vehicle drives itself, while vehicles using advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) would remain under the driver’s full responsibility.
Establishing a clear distinction matters because of the rapid adoption of ADAS, and the relative sparsity of vehicles operating at and beyond SAE Level 4. Level 2 ADAS technology is already present in 70.5% of the new cars sold in China so far in 2026, but the new liability rule targets only the far smaller population of fully-autonomous vehicles cleared for public roads. The threshold is being reinforced by a separate mandatory Level 3/Level 4 safety standard announced by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, also announced in August and which will take effect from July 2027.
China has built toward establishing self-driving regulation gradually, rather than in a single leap. Municipal test zones began granting supervised permits from 2017, Shenzhen passed the country’s first city-level autonomous vehicle liability law in 2022, and Beijing issued its first Level 3 road-use permits, to Changan and BAIC, only in December 2025.
A parallel 2025 crackdown on ADAS marketing helped to lay the groundwork for this law. After a fatal Xiaomi SU7 crash in assisted-driving mode, regulators banned terms like “autonomous” and “self-driving” for Level 2 systems. The shift had tangible and immediate outcomes, perhaps the most noteworthy being that it forced Tesla to rebrand its Full Self-Driving ADAS with the more neutral “Intelligent Assisted Driving” in China. The rule also introduced fines of up to CN¥1m for overhyped claims.
A separate incident tested how far Beijing would let deployment outrun reliability. When more than 100 Baidu robotaxis stalled simultaneously in Wuhan in March, regulators froze all new Level 4 permits for three months, only resuming them gradually from late July without ever explaining what caused the outage.
China’s approach stands in sharp contrast to the West’s. “The Chinese government has a tighter control on its automotive sector, whereas the US is a patchwork quilt of different states,” TechInsights analyst Kevin Mak told Automotive World in 2025, noting that the US appears to be loosening certain aspects of ADAS oversight rather than tightening it. A February 2025 AAA survey found only 13% of Americans trust self-driving technology, against 57% of Chinese consumers.