China’s new rules for assisted and automated driving (GB 47955 and GB 44721)

For years Chinese carmakers raced to put more automation into their cars, with marketing that sometimes ran ahead of the technology. Between 2025 and 2026 the government stepped in with a set of rules that every engineer working on driver assistance should know. Some are already in force, others start in 2027. Here is the overview, in the order they arrived.

April 2025: no more “autonomous driving” in adverts

The turning point was a crash on 29 March 2025 in Anhui province: a Xiaomi SU7 with its NOA system active hit a concrete barrier in a construction zone at night, and three people died. The system warned the driver about two seconds before impact. A few weeks later the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) met the carmakers and set new guidelines (autoevolution, electrive):

• terms such as “autonomous driving”, “self-driving” or “smart driving” can no longer describe Level 2 systems; the official wording is “combined driver assistance” or “L2 assisted driving”;
• over-the-air updates that change driver assistance functions need approval before release, and public beta testing on customers’ cars was stopped;
• driver monitoring cannot be switched off by the user.

In September 2025 Xiaomi recalled about 117,000 SU7s to improve the way the system recognizes and responds to unusual conditions, through a software update (Caixin).

December 2025: the first Level 3 permits

On 15 December 2025 MIIT granted the first product access permits for Level 3 cars to two models: a Changan Deepal (SL03 family) and a BAIC Arcfox Alpha S (CnEVPost, CarNewsChina). Level 3 means that, within its limits, the car drives and the driver may look away; the system must warn in time when the human has to take back control.

The limits are tight. The Changan car may drive itself in a single lane, in congested traffic, up to 50 km/h, on specific expressways in Chongqing. The Arcfox may do it up to 80 km/h on three expressways in Beijing. Both are operated in a pilot scheme that pairs the carmaker with a fleet operator. It is a first step, not a general opening, but it set an important principle: when an approved Level 3 system is driving, the manufacturer carries the primary responsibility.

February 2026: the driver is still responsible on Level 2

For the systems most people actually have, the courts went the other way. In February 2026 the Supreme People’s Court indicated that a driver using an assisted driving function remains legally responsible for the car (electrive). In other words: on Level 2, including city NOA, “the car was driving” is not a defence.

GB 47955-2026: the first mandatory standard for Level 2

Announced on 2 July 2026 and in force from 1 January 2027, GB 47955-2026 “Safety requirements for combined driver assistance systems of intelligent and connected vehicles” is China’s first compulsory standard for Level 2 (Xinhua, Gasgoo). Being “GB” without the “/T” suffix matters: it is not a recommendation, a car that does not comply cannot be sold.

It covers three classes of system: basic single-lane assistance, basic multi-lane assistance (lane changes), and navigation assisted driving, which is NOA. The requirements touch:

• the functions themselves and their behaviour at the limits of what they can handle;
• driver monitoring, including detection of hands off the wheel and eyes off the road, with escalating warnings;
• data recording, so that what the system and the driver did can be reconstructed after an incident;
• human machine interface, user manuals and user training, so that people understand what the system cannot do;
• the manufacturer’s safety responsibilities over the life of the product.

Several of these points, such as unremovable driver monitoring and event recording, turn the April 2025 guidelines into law.

GB 44721-2026: the baseline for Level 3 and Level 4

The second standard, approved on 30 July 2026, applies from 1 July 2027 to passenger and goods vehicles with Level 3 and Level 4 systems (automated parking is excluded) (CnEVPost). It replaces a recommended version from 2024. Its key ideas are:

• the system must be at least as safe as a competent and attentive human driver, and must not create unreasonable risks for the people inside or outside the car;
• Level 3 cars must monitor whether the driver is ready to take over and show clearly whether the system is available, active or switched off;
• manufacturers must have a safety management process covering design, production and operation after sale, in four areas: safety policy, risk management, safety assurance and continuous improvement;
• validation must combine simulation, test track and public road tests, and approval combines an audit of the company, a safety case and confirmation tests by a third party, using a common catalogue of test scenarios.

What it means in practice

For engineers, the direction is familiar to anyone who knows European regulations such as UN R157 for lane keeping or ISO 26262 and ISO 21448 for functional safety: less freedom in how a system is presented, more evidence on how it was tested and what it records. For buyers, the message is simpler. Until 2027, and probably for a good while after, almost every car sold in China with “NOA” is a Level 2 car: very capable, often impressive in city traffic, and still fully dependent on a driver who pays attention.

If you want to know more about how these systems work, see what NOA is and how it spread and how reinforcement learning is used to train them.