On August 25, a draft revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law was submitted for its first reading at the 24th session of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress. The draft runs to nine chapters and 170 articles, and for the first time devotes a standalone chapter to autonomous vehicles.
That chapter centers on three things. First, it draws a clear conceptual line between autonomous vehicles and assisted-driving functions, and sets conditions under which autonomous vehicles may be driven on public roads. Second, if a road traffic safety violation occurs while the autonomous driving function is active, the vehicle's manufacturer or importer is held responsible. Third, an autonomous vehicle whose self-driving function is not active, and a vehicle equipped only with assisted-driving functions, are both regulated under the same rules as ordinary, non-autonomous vehicles. The chapter also covers principles for handling violations and the insurance system.
Where exactly the line is drawn
Defining the concepts first, then assigning responsibility based on the function's operating state — the sequence is deliberate. Over the past two years, marketing language has blurred terms like “smart driving,” “advanced smart driving,” and “navigation-assisted driving.” When something went wrong, liability determinations kept circling back to a question that's hard to reconstruct after the fact: did the driver fulfill the duty to take over in time? The draft's approach shifts the starting point of liability determination from a driver's subjective state to the vehicle's objective state: whether the function was active or not is a fact that can be verified.
That comes with a trade-off. Whether the function was active, the exact second it disengaged, and how much advance warning was given before handover — only the vehicle's own data logs can answer that, and those logs sit with the manufacturer. Once the burden of proof shifts toward automakers, the standards for how that data is retained, formatted, and retrieved become the key to whether this chapter can actually be implemented. The draft's public wording so far stays at the level of principle; the specific rules will depend on supporting regulations that come later.
Stepping back further, regulatory focus over the past few years has been on market access and road-testing permits — questions of whether a company can build these vehicles and whether it can test them on public roads. This draft instead addresses what happens after something goes wrong on the road, and who is on the hook. Put the two together, and autonomous driving shifts from a product-access issue to a day-to-day road management issue.
Other provisions are tightening too
The same draft also contains several changes that hit closer to home for ordinary drivers. Making or answering handheld phone calls, watching videos, or other behavior that interferes with safe driving, if it causes a traffic accident or other serious consequences, is punishable by a fine of 200 to 500 yuan, and a driver's license can also be suspended for three months. Targeting so-called “road-hogging groups” that block traffic, the draft states that no unit or individual may occupy a road for non-traffic activities without permission. The maximum speed for electric bicycles riding in non-motorized lanes is raised from 15 km/h to 20 km/h, while the draft also explicitly bans riding against traffic, speeding, running red lights, and making or answering handheld calls or watching videos while riding.
The current Road Traffic Safety Law took effect in 2004 and has been amended three times since — in 2007, 2011, and 2021 — each time only partially. The scale of this draft, nine chapters and 170 articles, signals a full rewrite rather than a partial fix. Under China's legislative process, a bill typically needs at least one more reading after this first one before it can go to a vote, and the text can still be revised during that process.
If the principle that “the manufacturer is held responsible whenever the function is active” survives into the final text, two groups will feel it most directly in the near term. One is automakers that have marketed assisted-driving systems as if they were autonomous driving — their messaging will need to pull back: if the law classifies a system as autonomous driving, the ticket goes to the company; if it's classified as assisted driving, the maker has to admit it still requires a human watching at all times. The other is insurers. The same vehicle could have different liable parties at different moments, which means pricing models built around the driver need to be recalculated, and there's no ready-made template yet for a product priced around the vehicle's operating state instead. The draft mentions an insurance system, but the actual text hasn't been made public, and this is likely to be where the sharpest disagreements surface in later readings.
Sources: Xinhua News Agency, China News Service, CocoLoop, Sina Finance; verified against the draft's chapter and article count, the wording on liability in the autonomous-driving chapter, the adjusted electric-bicycle speed limit, and the fine range for behavior that interferes with safe driving.