On January 7, Hangzhou's Bureau of Economy and Information Technology announced that the ZEEKR 9X — a Geely Auto model equipped with the Qianli Haohan H9 stack — has passed a joint review by the city's economy and IT, public security and transport authorities, and obtained a citywide L3 autonomous driving road-test license.
The approved scope covers all of Hangzhou — 9,224 square kilometers — and includes more than 1,500 kilometers of expressways and urban expressways, making it China's broadest L3 road-test license by area and mileage. Under the test plan, the ZEEKR 9X will connect to traffic datasets for over 7,000 intersections, conducting full-scale, multi-layer, citywide validation of autonomous driving scenarios.
Image source: Geely Auto
Unlike domestic peers still confined to designated stretches, Hangzhou's citywide test environment spans city streets and expressways, feeding autonomous systems with vast troves of complex, real-world data — the backbone for rapid iteration.
On this foundation, Geely will also build the nation's largest autonomous driving corpus, accumulating foundational data to support industry R&D and regulatory refinement.
The green light rests on the technical capabilities of the ZEEKR 9X's Qianli Haohan H9 stack. The setup includes five LiDAR units and dual Thor chips, delivering 1,400 TOPS of compute. It enables 360° all-around environmental perception and adopts a dual end-to-end model architecture to boost system reliability, meeting L3's rigid safety redundancy requirements.
The timing aligns with an acceleration in L3 commercialization across China. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has already announced the first batch of L3 model approvals, while Hangzhou's citywide license — granted via a joint-review mechanism — further strengthens the policy framework.
For Geely, the citywide testing permit is a key proving ground, helping close gaps in advanced autonomy under complex conditions. For the industry, it marks a shift from localized pilots to citywide validation — clearing key hurdles to commercialization and prompting upgrades to supporting systems from traffic management to insurance claims.
