Shanghai ranks first in China by number of licenses issued for autonomous driving road tests

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Shanghai has so far launched a total of 119 license plates for autonomous driving road tests to 20 companies, ranking first among China's cities in terms of the numbers of both licenses issued and companies conducting the tests, according to a local media report.

As of today, there have been 530.57-km-long roads launched in Shanghai for autonomous driving road tests—315 km in Jiading District, 118.2km in Lin-gang Special Area and 97.37km in Fengxian District. Test fleets in the city have by far logged over 650,000 km of testing range and a total of 28,000 hours of testing time.

Photo credit: DiDi

Shanghai is vigorously pushing ahead with the scale demonstration of intelligent vehicles including passenger vehicles (PVs), commercial vehicles (CVs) and special vehicles, and exploring the business model for the commercial operation of intelligent vehicles. Thus, substantial efforts have been made to achieve that goal, such as promoting pilot operation of SAIC Hongyan’s intelligent heavy-duty trucks at Yangshan Port, deploying driverless sanitary vehicles on the Inner Ring and Middle Ring elevated roads, and boosting demonstration of passenger-carrying autonomous cars of DiDi and Auto X in Jiading District.

According to the Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission, the number of testable scenarios has surpassed 5,000, covering urban arterial roads, secondary trunk roads, branch roads, expressways, industrial park, urban business districts, campuses, schoolyards, docks and transport hubs, and enabling road tests and demonstration for both self-driving PVs and CV.

Meanwhile, to ensure testing safety, Shanghai has drawn up the methods on evaluating the complexity of testing road environment and regulating testing scenarios, and normalized the requirements on traffic monitoring system, test data recording system and road maintenance.