SAIC Motor’s chairman proposes speeding up ICV development, relaxing traffic restriction

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- During this year's two sessions, Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor Corporation Limited and a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress, proposed supporting the eligible regions in speeding up the development of intelligent-connected vehicles (ICVs).

He proposed the Chinese government to break through the restriction of laws and regulations in some designated routes and regions under administrative control first to meet ICVs' road testing demands. The eligible regions like the Yangtze River Delta should be encouraged to build the pilot zones for highly automated (Level 3 or above) autonomous driving applications in places with favorable development conditions such as Shanghai's Donghai Bridge and International Automobile City at Jiading District.

By coordinating with relevant state's departments, local governments should allow the pilot zones to have highly automated cars tested and applied on expressways or viaducts, and take the lead in conducting in specific areas the commercial trial of passenger-/goods-carrying autonomous vehicles without human safety guard, he said. These moves are beyond limitations of current laws and regulations.

He also proposed to accelerate the construction of the so-called “new infrastructures” for intelligent automobile industry. The eligible regions should be upheld in expediting the building of smart vehicle-related infrastructure system starting with 5G-enabled facilities, ICVs and intelligent transport system, etc., and moving faster on fostering pertinent innovation and industry chains.

China should also improve the management level of urban transport business and gradually relax cities' traffic restriction and automobile purchase limitation, he stated.

He suggests that cities speed up the replacement of the simple traffic restriction with approaches based on big data and smart traffic management system. Driven by the new infrastructure development, the pace of constructing 5G and big data facilities will largely pick up. Through integrating the data of Internet-based road conditions and smart traffic management, a thorough perception to pedestrians, vehicles, roads, transport equipment and real-time traffic conditions will be achieved.

Traffic restriction should be gradually supplanted by market-driven methods, such as applying dynamic management to areas suffering severe traffic jams, and increasing vehicles' running costs in peak hours.  

He also proposes to strengthen the building of stereoscopic parking garages at residential quarters, and launch the platforms for parking spot sharing (photo source: SAIC Motor's WeChat account).