China plans national safety standards

China wants to take a leading role in terms of autonomous driving. One way to achieve this is the standardized safety assessment of vehicles.

There are worldwide ambitions to unify safety standards. This not only increases the safety of vehicles, but also leads to a basic trust in the technology and makes distribution easier.

Just as in Germany the TÜV (Technical Inspection Agency) monitors uniform vehicle safety, in China there will soon be government regulations on how the safety of automated vehicles should look.

There are a number of companies in the Chinese Republic, especially start-ups, that want to offer a robot taxi service in the coming years. WeRide wants to be ready next year and AutoX has already made plans and found cooperation partners.

Therefore, the central authorities of China are now mainly asking the operators of closed test fields to provide their standards for safety assessment. The data should be transferred to a central office.

This will be used to create a set of rules so that there are standardized safety evaluations. This set of rules will then also break local regulations.

The USA can take a special path in this case. The technology is being developed there to a considerable extent, but it cannot be approved in many parts of the world.

This is thanks to the approval procedure. There is no approval procedure in the USA like in Germany. In this country, a vehicle must first prove that it is safe. This is not necessarily the case in the USA.