At the moment, there’s little standardization on how autonomous cars work, or how they should work, or what even counts as autonomy. The Chinese government wants to change that.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced at a conference yesterday that it is working on a set of national standards for autonomous cars, as the Chinese government mouthpiece The People’s Daily reports. What these tech specs will entail, we do not know, but the government is currently funding the development of an autonomous car research area in Shanghai to test things out.
There’s much less pushback from the Chinese government against autonomobiles than there is in the states, as Gizmodo has reported before. Time will tell if they’ll ever actually get more cars on the road before we Americans do, or if this will turn out more like their less-than-fruitful efforts to leapfrog the U.S. in electric vehicle development and sales.