Discussion keeps the world turning.
China just laid down new rules for self-driving cars, and it forces automakers to do something they've never had to do before.
Stay responsible for safety long after you buy the car, not just for day one, forever.
So what happens when the tech grows up, and who's really watching the road?
We're live from our studios here in Beijing.
This is Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly.
Thanks for being with us today and for the show.
I'm with Yushan and Yushan.
First up.
Remember when self-driving cars sounded like something from a science fiction film?
It wasn't that long ago, but apparently the future has decided it's tired of waiting for us.
Cars are
Getting smarter much smarter
They can see the road make decisions change lanes and in some cases actually drive themselves and it sounds fantastic
And it is
Until though you start asking some very basic questions
What happens when the car gets confused
Who's responsible when something goes wrong?
And perhaps most importantly, can we actually trust a machine with our lives?
Well, China is now trying to put some answers to those questions on paper.
The country has released its first mandatory national safety standards for level 3 and level 4 autonomous driving, setting out rules for what these cars should be able to do and what happens when they can't.
Yishun and Yishun, good afternoon to you both.
We'll get into the self-driving cars in just a sec, but before we begin today...
It's kind of an exciting announcement, I think.
It's not really an announcement.
It's more of a request that we have here at Roundtable for our listeners.
So here's what we're doing.
Next Wednesday, August 19th, is Chinese Valentine's Day.
I'm sure, Yuxin, you've been preparing for it for months.
And as a result of that, we are doing a story on Chinese Valentine's Day.
So here's what we are asking you, our listener to do.
Tell us about your dating experience these days.
We have two specific questions for you.
What is the most important thing you look for when trying to find your partner?
And number two, what's it like dating in China in 2026 in the city that you're living?
Is it easy?
Is it not easy?
Is it impossible?
Is it stressful?
Tell us all about that.
And we have listeners all around the world for Roundtable.
So if you're living outside of China, tell us what it's like dating in your city in 2026, wherever it is that you're living.
Send your answers to roundtablepodcast at qq.com.
You can send an email.
That's cool.
But if you can send a voice note, that would be better because we want to hear your voices when you're talking about the romance in your life.
Yeah, it sounds so exciting.
I think I have my own answers, but I will definitely wait for the day that we discuss this topic.
Make sure you're on that episode.
Don't miss it.
I'll try to remember to remind you at the end of the show of what we're asking before we finish up today.
All right, so let's get into it.
This is a pretty significant move when we're talking about self-driving cars and the new rules and new regulations that are going to come into effect.
I'm not sure that you have you already like tried some of these auto driving or something.
No, the only thing I've seen, I've seen videos of people down in Shenzhen where they were taking taxis, self-driving taxis, and they were making videos about the experience and stuff like that.
I, though, have not had the experience myself.
I've only had one witnessing experience while I was driving on the road and I just saw a car.
It's apparently an EV driving in front of me with a little label at the back trunk indicating everyone that I am on auto driving.
If you want to get past me, please be nice.
And there was no driver in that car?
I actually didn't really look to the side to see if there's any person inside.
Safe drive, safe drive, yes.
Yeah, so that's the only case that I encountered out there in the city center here in Beijing.
Yeah, the fact that you saw that is also indicating that there are some levels of self-driving now in a lot of cities in China.
And yeah, they...
They keep themselves in the lane and adjust the speed.
That's basically the level that we are experiencing right now with all of these self-driving.
And there is an important question though.
What happens when the car is no longer just helping you drive?
But actually takes responsibility for driving.
Used to be a theoretical question, but it's not a theoretical question anymore.
And just a couple of months ago, we had the discussion of, you know, China has already approved its first batch of L3 vehicles for road use under controlled conditions.
Two brands, they are testing, and I am quite sure that Yushan that you saw is one of the brands that is testing their self-driving vehicle.
And robo-taxis are already carrying passengers without a human driver, actively controlling the vehicle in cities such as Wuhan in central China, and also Shenzhen, that's what you saw the video in, in southern China.
You know, that gives us a kind of much more interesting question that simply how good is the technology if a car can drive itself most of the time, what happens during the moment when it can't?
And that is the question behind China's latest move on the autonomous driving.
On August 4th, 2026, China officially released a standard.
It's called the safety requirements for automated driving systems in intelligent connected vehicles.
And it is China's first mandatory national standard, specifically covering level three and level four.
We will get into what that actually means, the level three and level four means.
And level three, level four automated driving systems.
And it is scheduled to take effect on July the 1st next year, which is 2027.
Yeah, so it gives a year, almost a year for companies to adjust, car makers to adjust.
But this is really significant.
You said it is the first mandatory national standard specifically for L3 and L4 systems.
So it's going to be in passenger vehicles.
It's also going to be in freight vehicles, which is another significant point to this.
And it's a big change away from the previous...
Recommended national standard towards this mandatory safety requirement.
We're going to learn about these safety requirements and what they mean for all of us.
But the whole point here is that this is not just a piece of paperwork.
These are changes that will need to be take will take place and will need to be followed by everyone involved.
Thank you.
And also speaking of l2 l3 l4
I remember the last time we talked about topics following this theme we mentioned as if l3 and l4 is only the ideas but now they're gradually moving from demonstrations just into our daily life
And as we try to dive into this i'll i'll
I actually looked up a little bit just to know more about what these L numbers are like.
So apparently there are five different levels with L0 to L5, with L0 being just 100% human.
Zero to five, then that's six.
Zero, one, two, three, four, five.
That's the calculation.
Thank you.
Yep.
So there are overall six levels.
He's the kid you don't want to sit next to in class.
Exactly.
The outsmarting everyone kind of kid.
But apparently that level differentiation is just on who is actually driving the car.
If it's 100% human driving, then it's L0.
With L5, the science fiction version of...
You can imagine the car drive itself everywhere.
So now we're kind of like in the middle, if not between two to three, if three to four is where we're looking next year.
So level three, meaning the car actually drives, but only under certain conditions.
This is when under specific conditions, for example, on certain highways and at certain speeds, the car monitors the road and performs the driving task for you.
You can take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road, but you cannot simply leave.
There's still got to be a human being sitting at the driver's seat.
I think a lot of modern cars are equipped with L3 systems, are they not?
Where you have driver assistance that will kind of do the steering for you.
Um lane adjustments things like that
I would say most of the cars
They will claim that they equipped with l2 and they are saying that we are very very close to l3
I think that's also about the kind of um
Regulation and document kind of thing that is restricting them to not claim them as L3 because they have not passed that kind of standard.
So they have like little sprinklings of L3 qualities maybe, but not fully L3 licensed.
Exactly.
Then because we also know that this is the new standard and L3 is that kind of system that you are still required to take over when the car realize that they cannot handle the situation.
And then after that is L4.
It goes one step further.
A little bit further
Within a specific area or set of conditions, the car can handle the entire driving task without a human driver having to take over, which means that you don't even need a driver in the driver's seat.
Fully autonomous.
Yeah.
In some testing regions, we now have an e-hailing rise that does not require a driver.
Does that qualify as L4?
Yes, it's actually more kind of...
That we can see because a lot of these companies, they are developing L4 instead of L3 because they are in a designated area.
You can only hold the cars in that area and they will take you to the specific area.
Spots that you require.
Yeah, we're not really... Well, we are approaching, I think, the times of...
Putting out cars where people are required to do less and less.
But fully, fully automated for the mass market, I don't think we're even close to that yet.
And then when you get to L5 where, yeah, you don't need to do anything at all and it doesn't matter what the conditions are, that's quite a distance away from now.
But yes, these new regulations are going to go into effect, you said July 1st in 2027, right?
So what exactly is on the list?
The first thing is that for car manufacturing companies, previously, if it's a layer up of different high-tech stuff they're adding to their car, nowadays, it has shifted to a very high priority on safety.
So let's start with safety, which is like a big...
Thing with how they're developing L3 cars in the future, because it's no longer just a test before the car goes on sale.
And after it's sold to you to your hand, it's like, boom, our job is done from the company's side.
But no, in the future is going to be a progressive long term promise from the company's side.
So a car can pass a test today and encounter something completely unexpected tomorrow.
So the new standard now requires manufacturers to establish safety measures covering the whole life of the product from the design all the way to the production, the testing and development.
Even in the future, after launching the car, the companies are still expected to continuously monitor real-world driving data so that they can keep on improving your driving experience and also keep on adding those different scenarios to their future car designs.
It means that cars must remain safe as it encounters millions of unpredictable real-world situations.
And that is, I think, something that is really important because
Back then, we will have the mindset of, okay, if the car claim that they are safe enough, that is the moment that they launch the car.
And after you got and you bought the car,
They are like out of responsibility.
Yeah, it's up to you now if you encounter anything.
Well, that's why this is such a significant change because it's a massive, massive difference in the auto industry as a whole.
Because, yeah, the automotive industry over the past, you know, 100 plus years, that old mindset was for them, safety is like a snapshot, right?
When you...
When they test the car, they're testing the brakes to make sure that the brakes work.
They test the lights to make sure the lights work.
They test the steering wheel to make sure the steering wheel tests the emergency brake.
And then, yep, okay, everything works.
Airbags, check.
They work too.
All right, here you go.
Car's yours.
And now, if anything happens with those, that's your problem.
It's not our problem.
But this is completely different now because of what the car is.
When you're talking about an automated vehicle, you're talking about a computer, basically software that is in charge of the vehicle.
And things are going to be changing on the road all the time.
So the computer can only, it's like training AI, I guess, right?
You could put more data and more data into it, but that data will never, it will never stop learning.
And it will never stop needing to be upgraded.
And that's why this is such a significant change.
It's a total new mindset.
Where safety is becoming like a never-ending process as opposed to check, check, check, check, check.
Okay, we did our job.
Here's your car.
And the new standard, I think, it is listing a lot of very, very specific rules on how the car makers can make these cars and test these cars.
And the standard is essentially asking manufacturers to design cars that behave.
That's the language in the rule.
Behave.
To behave like caution's human driver who knows when to stop.
More specifically, if lane markings disappear in maybe heavy rain or snow, the system should reduce speed and increase following distance rather than continuing at highway speed.
If sensors become partially blocked, for example, mud on a camera or snow on the radar, the car should warn the driver early and gradually hand back control instead of just waiting until the situation becomes worse.
And if the system detects confusing road conditions like overlapping construction lanes and temporary traffic signs, it should avoid making uncertain decisions and instead transition to a safer state.
Yeah, that's important, too, because at the same time, the standard also establishes requirements for what is called a minimal risk strategy.
So that means if the car can no longer safely continue driving and the chip makes the decision that, oops.
I can't do it anymore.
It should try to get itself into a safer situation.
Don't just stop in the middle of the road.
Exactly.
That's going to cause a lot of traffic hazards if you imagine something like that happen.
Like all of a sudden, the car just refused to move, for example.
And instead of just stopping in the middle of a road, that vehicle might, for example, slowly move to the shoulder of the road or activate hazard lights or maintain control of steering and braking until fully stopped and only then request assistance from the human driver's side.
I want to go back to what you said about handing over control of the car.
What was it that you said that the car has to notify the driver that I am unable to I meaning the car.
I can't do it anymore.
I can't handle it.
Yeah.
So in this scenario, the car is encountering some, I don't know, icy road conditions.
Or it starts to pour down rain heavily, for example.
I don't know what the exact example would be, but the car tells the driver...
You need to take over now.
The car needs to communicate with the human driver.
What does that process look like?
And how long is that process?
Because if I'm sitting there on my phone playing a game because I don't have to pay attention to the road,
Do I suddenly get like an alert from the car, like take over now?
That also seems potentially dangerous to me if I'm not fully aware of what's happening on the road either.
Actually, the standard also explicitly states
Tells that there is a very specific time or buffer zone for drivers to actually take over the control of the car.
And to make this real, the standard requires very explicit communication between car and also driver.
A visual signal on the dashboard showing whether the system is active or about to disengage, and then a sound alert that escalates in urgency like soft warning and then to repeated chime and to urgent alarm.
And also a time buffer before takeover, giving the driver enough time to react rather than an instant handover.
And I assume that is 10 seconds.
We'll get into that later.
And a driver monitoring system that checks whether the driver is actually paying attention before allowing the activation in the first place.
There should be also specific, I think, sensors or cameras that is detecting whether the driver is capable enough to take over the system.
And an example of capable enough is conscious.
Awake cameras in the vehicle or perhaps outside the vehicle.
I'm not sure where they would be located.
It could be on the side mirror as well, looking in at the driver, maybe.
I'm not sure.
To make sure that the driver is awake and alert and ready
That's an important point because it's not just like the car will, you know, give those build up warnings from the soft chime to the beep, beep, beep, and just release control of the vehicle if the human is not ready to take.
Yeah, and also if the car is in, I'm just imagining the scenarios now, if the car system is aligning with, for example, a map system, and then the road the map is telling it to go is actually blocked in real life, then if the driver is not paying attention, maybe the car really needs to
Try to alert the driver at some point before it actually runs into a block.
Something like that.
It all comes down to the details that make a huge difference.
So for L3 system, like you mentioned earlier, Yusheng, the vehicle must also be able to monitor whether the driver is capable of taking control.
So previously, my biggest concern with this is, does this change anything with drunk driving?
Because in China, drunk driving is such a big deal that it's strongly prohibited for any time, any road, specific road district region.
And does this...
Technology activate like the Pandora's box for that?
No, there would be no, no, no.
Well, I don't, I don't know.
I'm just, this is how I would answer that question.
I would agree too.
Yeah.
Because it's L3, right?
The meaning the driver has to take over if they need to.
So I don't think that would apply here.
All right, so that's the communication between the software, the car, and the driver.
What about for the companies?
This is kind of the other side of the coin, and this is the fourth on the list, right?
What companies need to do to prove that their cars are safe and ready for the road.
That's why I think this standard is a really comprehensive standard.
And the new standard also establishes a more comprehensive inspection and testing system instead of just simply asking, does this particular car pass the test?
When launching, regulators can also look at things like can the companies actually manage safety?
Does it have a safety record?
And also can the vehicle pass confirmation tests?
And to make this more concrete, this could include requirements like a company must show evidence of millions of kilometers of simulated driving data before you actually launch this car, not just a few successful road tests.
Not hundreds of thousands, millions of kilometers.
Yes, and also it must demonstrate how the system behaves in rare but dangerous events such as sudden tire blowouts or sensor failures at high speed or multi-car pileups.
And regulators may review whether the company has a real-time safety monitoring system, meaning it can detect and respond quickly if a pattern of risk appears in the field.
So by testing, we actually mean not only simulations, but also test tracks and real road tests.
So this is important because an autonomous car is not just a machine with wheels.
It's a combination of sensors, plus software, plus AI algorithms, plus handware and communications with the driver, plus data and human interaction, all that.
So a problem in any one of these key areas could potentially risk the whole safety of your driving experience.
So they have to test out everything from all possible angles.
I wonder what it will mean for marketing.
Because I was just thinking, now when we watch a vehicle's commercial, they're talking about performance a lot of the times, right?
Like this many horsepower or whatever it is they're trying to promote on the car.
I'm thinking that in the future, the strategy might change to this is how safe our car is.
And I know other companies in the past, Volvo, for example, I'm not sure about in other countries, but in Canada, they were always pushing their safety standards.
Exactly.
So it's not like it would be brand new, but I'm just thinking
If you go from the angle of human beings and there's going to be a trust issue in the beginning, I would think companies would want to sell their safety features first and foremost.
I would guess anyway.
Yeah.
And I think this would change the whole concept of the car manufacturers because before they will be just, okay, we are able to manufacture the safe cars or powerful cars.
But now it's more about the whole ecosystem, the cycle of proving that their cars are safe enough for even after they sell the car.
It's more like the new regulatory environment changes the question of how we can make cars.
It's about the car companies.
They have to make sure they're in every step of the whole cycle.
What about liability?
This is a big change, too.
That's why the lifting from level two to where we're now, a direction towards level three is so important, at least here for the Chinese drivers in the future, is that the standard...
Provides clear guidance on market access and liability for the rollout of Level 3 autonomous drivings.
And that's according to Ji Xuehong, Director of the Autonomous Industry Innovation Research Center at North China University of Technology.
So specifically,
If the car is driving itself and causes an accident, the car company is responsible, not the person in the driver's seat.
The car company.
And here comes the 10-second rule, Yushan, that you brought up briefly before.
Yes.
If the driver fails to take over within 10 seconds after receiving a takeover warning, then responsibility falls back on the driver.
And this helps resolve a very longstanding dispute over liability because we can never, if unfortunately a car accident happened.
We cannot know, okay, the car makers can say we have already warned you and the car driver can say it was on the mode of auto driving.
So we cannot actually identify who is responsible for that.
That's for L2.
And now we are having this kind of clear understanding on where the liability goes to.
So now in the future, for example...
Car manufacturers are still manufacturing cars under L2, but they're also manufacturing new cars, newer cars under L3.
So those that's going to the market that follows under the L3 standard will have to follow this certain liability rules.
And car companies, they need to have such expectations in preparation.
So does this mean these rules come into effect July 2027?
Does that mean we're all going to be in the self-driving cars next year?
No, me not for one, starting from me.
I'm not really trusting any of these systems anytime soon.
I don't know about you.
You shouldn't.
For me, I have never tried these kind of auto driving, but for these companies, of course, we know that it take effect in July 2027 and establish a kind of mandatory safety baseline for these L3 and L4 systems.
But companies still have to develop their cars, their products, and complete testing and obtain the relevant approvals.
And consumers still need to understand exactly what a particular vehicle is legally and technically allowed to do.
And that responsibility falls to the company.
Too, right?
They have to have all their information on their own websites and on the car's display screens.
I mean, maybe more so than ever, a driver needs to be completely aware of what the car will do in any given situation and what they need to do
To successfully take over from the car and when that takeover might be expected.
It's just getting quite complicated.
Wow.
This reminds me all of a sudden that in the future, maybe getting a driving license, the whole rule for that is going to change too.
Yeah, definitely.
It's always been changing because I...
Oh, it's almost a year now.
I got my driver's license.
We remember it was a big day.
And before that, I got reminded that
The exam for getting a driver's license is keeping changing according to the keeping changing like regulations on cars, regulations on road.
So yeah, it's always been changing and the car industry, I think they are also changing.
First of all, the industry consensus is that after this mandatory national standard takes effect next year, some of these leading automakers with mature technology will begin rolling out compliant L3 and L4 vehicles on a larger scale.
But as of now, most of these programs remain testing and also piloting and limited access stage rather than just entering mass production for the mainstream market.
And some example is that no automaker has publicly announced a new or revised mass production timeline specifically in response to this standard.
But before this new standard rolled out,
A lot of these Chinese companies, including like Xiaopeng or Huawei-backed brands such as Avatar or Ito, have been preparing their L3 products through some testing and also pilot programs.
I just don't know how popular these are going to be.
Because I don't know if we need this.
I mean, the fact that we can do it
We as if I'm involved, the fact that they can do it is impressive, but it doesn't guarantee that customers are going to want these things.
And if they don't want them, then they're going to have a hard time selling that as a feature.
But that being said, it might not be important.
Here's a couple of statistics.
This is from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
70 plus percent of new passenger vehicles sold in China in the first half of 2026 were equipped with L2 driver assistance systems.
Great.
That's about seven out of every 10 cars.
But...
Industry experts also estimate that fewer than 10% of owners of these vehicles have actually activated or used those functions.
So you have the majority of new cars being sold in the first half of this year with L2 driver assistance systems, but nobody's using them.
So does that mean that we're just not ready for that yet?
Or does it mean that we're not going to accept that at all?
Or
Is there enough of a difference between L2 and L3 that it will bump up those usage numbers?
Do you see where I'm going with this?
I don't know if we need this or not.
I think it's cool for robo taxis and stuff like that, but for your own personal car, I'm not so sure.
I'm not convinced.
Um,
Sort of on your side, but not fully yet.
Still, I'm not quite there at this point to completely trust such systems to take over human driver for the majority of the time when I...
I don't even know in the future if I'm driving the car or the car is driving itself.
So that's the whole complexity, trust issue, like how or to what extent our drivers are going to or able to trust those systems making decisions on the road out there.
But imagine this in the future if...
That 70% of cars race to 90%.
If nearly all the cars out there already runs based on an L3, if not L4 system in a few years, two years time perhaps, then
I don't think this conversation would actually matter because by then the majority of us could probably have already tried just how good or bad that it turns out to be.
So that we have this like a persona built for these cars or these services that we're going to have and know to what extent it can work.
Protect us or have risks in the future when we're driving.
So at this point, not quite yet.
But in the future, I believe there will be more and more people following on to this.
Yeah, I think that 10% stats already proved that a lot of people still, I think, have the mindset as Yushan.
And I've come across a lot of people who bought a new car equipped with these assisting system.
And they said, I just don't trust them.
They won't use that.
Because the mass majority out there are still human drivers.
The ecosystem is different.
But the thing is that when you get on the road, you can see a lot of these cars equipped with little blue lights.
I'm not sure if you noticed that more and more cars are using that.
That means that they are auto driving.
So, of course, we are at the stage of we're getting into that kind of new era of having auto driving in our cars.
Some people are trying it, but the things that we are not like trying it.
That much enough, I think, because I have a lot of also friends that that are already using these kind of auto driving in their cars.
They started text messaging when they're having these kind of autopiloting thing on that.
Yeah, if it's me, I wouldn't be so sure when I was because I can feel so nervous when even I was holding the steering wheel.
True.
But, you know, at the moment that people started to trust that system, maybe it still takes time.
I think that's the thing.
Is that this is kind of mind-blowing to us because we're hearing about it for the first time, right?
Whoa, I can be in my own car and it drives itself.
But I think there's going to come a point in the pretty near future, like you said, Yushan, where the tech is not really that mind-blowing to us anymore.
And when that kind of – when it loses its shine –
Then we get used to it and it'll just be a part of you know whatever
An l3
You got an l3 car if you want
If you want to drive it go ahead
But if you're not in the mood you don't feel good you got to take a phone call
Let the car take off it'll just become normal
Yeah i think it's just so new right now that we're sitting here kind of freaking out about it right
