Gasgoo Munich- The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held a media roundtable in Beijing on July 27, 2026. Under the theme "Gathering Wisdom and Energy, Connecting Infinitely — Steadily Advancing into the New Era of Autonomous Driving," the event features three plenary sessions centered on critical industry milestones and major topics.
Image Source: Huaban
Guo Shougang, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Department of Equipment Industry I, outlined the latest progress in intelligent connected vehicle testing. Nationwide, authorities have issued more than 20,000 test licenses and opened over 57,000 km of demonstration roads, with cumulative test mileage surpassing 220 million km. Additionally, 20 pilot cities for "vehicle-road-cloud integration" have deployed over 60,000 intelligent devices, serving a total of more than 100,000 vehicles.
On the application front, data shows the penetration rate of L2 combined driver assistance systems in passenger vehicles has hit 70.5% so far this year, while models featuring Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) reached 34.2%. Furthermore, the first batch of L3 conditional autonomous driving vehicles has received approval to operate on public roads in designated zones.
Sun Hang, chief expert at the China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CATARC) and chief engineer at the China Automotive Standardization Research Institute, highlighted progress on regulatory frameworks. He noted that the UN ADS GTR, along with domestic standards for autonomous and combined driver assistance, have been issued or implemented. These documents provide a critical technical foundation for pilot demonstrations, product access management, and high-quality industry growth. Sun added that establishing these standards reinforces the principle of balancing functional innovation with safety, urging automakers to embed safety management across the entire product lifecycle while regulating R&D and market promotion activities.
Signals from the roundtable indicate that China's intelligent connected vehicle sector continues to advance in testing scale, feature adoption, and regulatory development. Across the industry, every link is steadily evolving toward greater standardization and systematization.
