Gasgoo Munich-"In the past, the race was about who had the most features, the highest specs, or the lowest price. In the future, it will be about who understands the user better and delivers unique experiential value." That was Zhang Jianyong, Party Secretary and Chairman of BAIC Group, speaking recently about the shifting landscape of industry competition at the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference.
When applied to new vehicle development, this immediately raises questions: What constitutes experience? How does design enter the product? And who defines the safety boundaries? Details like seat posture, door handle mechanisms, and screen form factors may seem far removed from core performance, yet drivers and passengers encounter them every single time they get behind the wheel.
These are also the questions that new policy guidelines are demanding automakers answer. In early October, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and three other departments released a draft notice seeking public comment on strengthening the management of automotive product innovation design and R&D testing verification. The consultation period runs until November 10.
The draft proposal lists 51 key technical parameters for vehicle product declarations. Of these, 41 relate to innovative design, while 10 cover R&D testing verification.
From now on, the user experience the industry chases must be built upon a verifiable foundation of safety.
Innovation Design Now Requires Its Own Form
Ten days after the draft's release, MIIT Chief Engineer Wang Weiming explained the context at a State Council press conference: domestic vehicle iteration is accelerating, and market innovation is active. However, this has been accompanied by copycat product launches and insufficient testing verification—issues that form the primary backdrop for the new rules from the four departments.
Under the previous announcement management framework, there was no independent reporting category for such innovative structures. When automakers declared new products, the focus was on dimensions, powertrain, emissions, and basic safety configurations.
Image Credit: Doubao
The design and verification status of components like door handles, screens, and cabins were absent from these forms. Regulators saw the end result—the installed configuration—but struggled to trace the design process back or systematically check if a company had conducted failure verification for a new structure. Safety judgments were largely left to the automakers' own discretion.
Now, the draft proposal extracts this content for separate scrutiny. Most questions are phrased as "Is it equipped with...": Does it have fully hidden door handles? Does it rely solely on electronic rearview mirrors? Does it use a foldable or flexible display? Can the retractable roof function be used while driving?
First comes the question of existence, then compliance. This approach may seem simple, but it effectively shifts the regulatory entry point: rather than investigating and handling problems after a vehicle hits the market, authorities now aim to assess the scale of new structures during the filing stage before drawing practical safety red lines.
The document also includes a prohibition list. For instance, fully hidden door handles are prohibited. Zero-gravity seats, rotating seats, reclining beds, and retractable roofs may be installed, but their use is prohibited while the vehicle is in motion; companies must use technical means to lock these functions during driving. Emergency escape, braking, and power cutoff controls must retain physical structures and clear markings. Soft-close doors must support manual opening in the event of power loss or failure. Innovative structures that fail risk assessments are strictly banned from mass production.
The benchmark for this list is whether there is a reliable fallback plan in case of failure. Take electronic rearview mirrors: their regulatory basis is the GB 15084 standard revised in 2022. Since July 2023, automakers have been legally allowed to declare models with mass-produced electronic mirrors. Three years since the regulation opened up, however, few models have adopted them, constrained mainly by procurement costs and user habits.
Electronic mirrors are also on the new checklist. The draft from the four departments requires that products equipped only with electronic mirrors must undergo additional assessment of driving safety impacts in complex scenarios like mud splatter or extreme weather. Foldable screens, by contrast, have been placed on the prohibition list. The dividing line lies in whether occupants have a second, reliable safety path when a new structure fails.
Beyond the new technical parameter requirements, the draft proposal issues two accompanying technical documents. One is the *Technical Guidelines for Automotive Product Innovation Design*, which clarifies risk assessment methods.
The other is the *Technical Specifications for Automotive Product R&D Testing Verification*, which outlines testing requirements. Verification covers six areas: comprehensive reliability and durability, structural reliability, software functional reliability, environmental adaptability, heating and cooling, and protection performance and sealing. These are not entirely new test items; the changes center on the scale of testing and the form of submission.
The new regulations establish a unified baseline for verification: reliability testing must cover no less than 30,000 kilometers; environmental adaptability verification must span at least one year and follow the sequence of extreme cold—extreme heat—extreme cold—what the industry commonly calls "two winters and one summer."
Image Credit: Shangjie Auto
Verification of innovative designs must be grounded in actual vehicle testing, with data traceable throughout the process. Companies can no longer submit simulation reports as the sole basis for verification. Parts featuring innovative designs must correspond item-by-item with the list, and a full set of verification materials must be retained.
The clause spells out the consequences for non-compliance: models that fail to test and verify as required, or that provide insufficient verification or falsified materials, will not receive a type approval announcement. Without an announcement, a vehicle cannot go on the market—a constraint far stronger than a routine regulatory talk.
The document sets a clear execution timeline. New model declarations will be subject to these rules starting January 1, 2027. Models that have already obtained approval have a six-month window to submit supplementary filings, ending July 1, 2027.
Typically, a new model takes 36 to 48 months from project launch to mass production, with verification alone occupying 8 to 12 months. The focus of this document, therefore, is not on new cars launching imminently, but on those currently in the design phase and slated for market release the year after next or later.
A single declaration form shifts the safety control node from post-market recall remediation to the entry gate before innovative designs reach mass production.
Verification Shifts from "Done" to "Submittable"
Beyond the declaration form, the annexes address another issue. For automakers' R&D systems, the biggest change is full-process material traceability. The annex requires companies to establish R&D testing verification management systems, retaining original records, reports, and supporting materials for at least six years. Problems exposed during testing must be rectified and re-verified before submission—no "filing with defects."
The document imposes hard requirements on physical vehicle testing. Declarations must include materials from actual vehicle measurements; simulation and bench data alone cannot serve as the basis for market entry. Safety verification for innovative structures relies on real-world road testing as the core; the path of closing a project loop solely through simulation calculations will no longer work in the new declaration process.
For environmental adaptability tests, companies may use alternative methods such as off-season testing or indoor environmental chamber simulations, but they must ensure the verification effectiveness is no less than actual road testing. For comprehensive environments involving multiple factors that are difficult to replicate equivalently in a lab, actual road testing is required.
The new rules also clarify the issuers of test reports and the chain of responsibility. Qualified third-party testing agencies can issue formal inspection documents. Automakers' internal labs can undertake most test items, but companies must provide a written commitment to the authenticity of all materials. If a test item involves mandatory national standards, the corresponding inspection report must be issued by a certified agency; internal data cannot substitute for it.
Furthermore, OEMs cannot simply accept component suppliers' test reports at face value. They must conduct vehicle-level incoming inspection on software and hardware parts like door handles and in-car screens. All component data must be integrated into the vehicle verification system to ensure that hardware versions and software configurations match the declared model.
Among these, door handles, folding screens, and "little blue lights" were named first. The reason is that such innovative components perfectly illustrate the necessity of vehicle-level verification.
Electronic door handles integrate mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and power systems. Electronic rearview mirrors encompass cameras, displays, and image algorithms. Failure in any single link can directly impact driving safety—which is why the document requires specific safety assessments for these structures.
Image Credit: Doubao
Data from the China Insurance Automotive Safety Institute (C-IASI) shows that models equipped with purely electronic hidden door handles have a door ejection success rate of just 67% after a side collision, far below the 98% rate of traditional mechanical handles. Additionally, complaints about frozen ejection mechanisms in northern winters remain high. This indicates that failure scenarios for electronic structures far exceed the coverage of early automaker testing.
On August 21, nine automakers simultaneously issued recall notices, recalling over 4 million new energy vehicles in total. The root cause of the malfunction was insufficient visibility of internal emergency handles, trapping occupants after power loss following a collision.
Currently, the state has issued the mandatory national standard *Technical Requirements for Automotive Door Handle Safety*, specifically targeting such loopholes. It requires that mechanical opening functions remain stable after power loss and that handle labels are clearly visible.
Folding screens, with their hinges and flexible substrate structures, create new sources of hard injury from screen edges and fixed brackets during a collision. Meanwhile, large passenger screens playing videos while driving can easily distract the driver. Relying solely on software locking functions in the vehicle head unit lacks external third-party verification means.
Furthermore, the installation position of passenger screens often overlaps with the deployment path of the passenger-side airbag. The screen structure directly alters the airbag's detonation trajectory, significantly increasing the complexity of crash safety calculations.
Against this backdrop, the draft proposal requires that vehicle products must complete actual vehicle testing verification; component bench data cannot replace vehicle-level actual testing.
The control logic for retractable roofs and external lighting language follows the same line. Raising the cabin while driving changes the vehicle's center of gravity and body height, drastically increasing the risk of rollover. Therefore, the new rules only allow this function when the vehicle is stationary.
External light language, meanwhile, is prone to confusion with statutory light signals. To unify the recognition logic of external lights, lighting rules released for public comment during the same period propose that indicator lights dedicated to automated driving must only use blue-green colors and are prohibited from displaying text or patterns to avoid misinterpretation by the public. The new lighting rules explicitly state that Level 2 driver-assist models cannot add such indicator lights—essentially moving post-market recalls forward to the entry stage.
This requirement for full-chain traceability in verification also echoes trends in industry safety management. When introducing BAIC's intelligent driving safety system, Zhang Jianyong included testing verification, process control, and operational monitoring in full lifecycle safety management.
François Roudié, Secretary General of the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA), noted that the UNECE World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations has adopted a global framework for Automated Driving Systems (ADS), emphasizing "reliable verification methods" and "responsibility after the vehicle is put into use." This aligns with the direction of the domestic draft, which requires test data to be archived throughout and production consistency to be traceable.
Software versions, test data, and iteration modification records for automotive safety functions must be archived throughout the entire process. Corporate practice and the new regulations are joining forces to demand a one-to-one correspondence between vehicle design, test data, and mass production configurations, eliminating loopholes where "one scheme is tested, but another configuration is produced."
Companies Must Recalculate Their Books
With verification thresholds raised, automakers need to recalculate their entire ledger. Cost pressure comes not only from the added benches and physical vehicle tests but also from deeper shifts in product development sequencing, supply chain responsibility division, and the very logic of industry competition.
The new rules solidify verification obligations on OEMs, reshaping collaboration with parts suppliers. Currently, door handles, screen hinges, and cabin actuators come from multi-tier supply chains where test report formats and test conditions vary. Automakers cannot simply aggregate materials; they must return component test conditions to the context of the vehicle's real-world operating conditions for review, ensuring hardware versions, software iteration records, and final installed status match perfectly.
This means OEMs must penetrate deeper down the supply chain, patching up process control over Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers. Domestic resources for testing agencies with announcement qualifications are limited. As a large batch of new projects concentrates on declarations, testing schedules will lengthen, further squeezing project development buffers.
Clear capability divergence will emerge among companies. Automakers with mature platform architectures can reuse partial verification results within their adaptation range, spreading compliance costs across multiple models and lowering per-vehicle costs. Those focusing on single models and lacking complete internal testing systems, however, will need to temporarily shore up their systems, testing capabilities, and archives, facing significantly more acute compliance pressure.
The returns on "first-to-market" configurations will also shrink. Many products in the past relied on launching novel features first to generate buzz and seize market voice. Now, innovative configurations must complete the full declaration and verification chain, extending project cycles. When making selection trade-offs, companies will weigh real user value against verification investment more carefully; the return on investment for functions designed solely to create differentiation gimmicks will drop significantly.
Regulation is no longer just an entry gate before market launch but extends into a full lifecycle control chain. It is understood that authorities will accelerate the issuance of documents and the revision of supporting standards while strengthening supervision and inspection in two areas: production consistency and testing agencies.
The configurations, functional boundaries, and software lock logic listed on the declaration form will become the direct basis for subsequent market inspections. New models that fail verification will be directly denied announcements; existing models with announcement qualifications that fail to supplement filings on time or pose safety risks will still face production stoppages or recalls. The two sets of handling conditions distinguish between new and old products to avoid the misinterpretation of a non-discriminatory collective stoppage of existing vehicles.
Viewed from a global perspective, this governance approach will also affect export business. China has formed a combined management model of "announcement entry + mandatory national standards + production consistency checks," which differs from the path of the European Union and the United States, where individual standards are gradually tightened.
Export models cannot simply organize and reuse domestic test materials. Parts involving innovative design require corresponding verification supplemented for overseas regulations. In the R&D budgets for export projects, verification-related expenses will need to be further increased.
As François Roudié noted, the automotive industry is built on a complete chain of responsibility; hardware, software versions, and verification records corresponding to safety functions should be traceable. The domestic new rules' requirements for archiving innovation design records precisely echo this global industry consensus.
Innovation will not halt; it will simply require proving safety and reliability before moving to mass production delivery.
