A driver lets go of the wheel and closes their eyes, trusting a system whose name says "assist" but feels like "autopilot." After a string of crashes traced to exactly this confusion, China's industry regulator moved — first with softer guidance, now with a rule that could become law.
On 17 September 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部, MIIT) opened public comment on a mandatory national standard titled "Safety Requirements for Combined Driving Assistance Systems of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles" (智能网联汽车 组合驾驶辅助系统安全要求). The comment window closed on 15 November 2025. If adopted, it would be a mandatory national standard (强制性国家标准) — meaning every relevant vehicle sold in China would have to comply. As of this writing, it remains a draft for comment; I found no published final version.
Key takeaways
- The draft is a mandatory national standard (强制性国家标准) for combined driving assistance (组合驾驶辅助) — the L2-level systems that control steering and speed but still require an attentive driver.
- It defines the system strictly: it may only activate within its designed operating conditions, and it must detect hands-off and gaze-off and then controllably exit if the driver does not respond.
- It explicitly targets misleading marketing: names and promotions must not imply the system is autonomous or has capabilities it lacks.
- A companion draft on recall, production consistency, and standardized promotion (feedback closed 15 September 2025) and a February 2025 MIIT–SAMR notice on product access, recall, and OTA upgrades are already in force — this safety standard would sit on top of them.
- Status: draft for comment (征求意见稿), not yet passed and not yet effective.
Why this landed now
Combined driving assistance has gone from premium feature to default spec. According to industry figures cited by Chinese state media, in the first seven months of 2025, new passenger cars equipped with combined driving assistance sold 7.76 million units, up 21.31 percent year on year, with the technology's penetration rate reaching 62.58 percent. That scale is precisely the problem: the more drivers meet the system daily, the more they mistake "assist" for "autopilot," and the more a single failure becomes a public-safety event.
The draft responds with what reporting has called a "safety baseline" (安全基线). It requires the system to state its applicable scenarios, road types, and weather limits; it sets human–machine interaction, functional safety, expected-functionality safety, information security, and data-recording requirements; and it builds what some analysts describe as a multi-layer guarantee — system capability plus process safeguards plus testing methods (field, road, document). The throughline is that the safety burden shifts partly from the driver onto the system's design.
What the draft would require
The document is unambiguous about who is in charge: the driver remains the主体 (subject) executing the dynamic driving task. The system's job is to keep that human honest. It must detect when hands leave the wheel or eyes leave the road, warn, and — if the driver ignores the warning — controllably hand back control or bring the vehicle to a safe state. One reported provision would disable the system for at least 30 minutes after repeated disengagement.
On the commercial side, the draft bars naming or advertising that suggests autonomy the system does not have, and it reinforces that over-the-air (OTA) updates must be filed and cannot quietly change a vehicle's safety character. These points echo the earlier MIIT–SAMR notice (工信部联通装〔2025〕45号, effective from issuance in February 2025), which already required carmakers to file combined-driving-assistance parameters, report related incidents and accidents, and manage OTA upgrades under a shared备案 (filing) system.
Reading the stage correctly
This is where precision matters. China's policy pipeline has four recognizable stages: draft for comment (征求意见稿), draft (草案), passed (正式通过), and effective (生效实施). The combined-driving-assistance safety standard is firmly at the first stage. It is a public consultation text, not an adopted rule. By contrast, the February 2025 MIIT–SAMR notice is already effective, and the August 2025 recall-and-promotion draft closed its comment window on 15 September 2025. Conflating "out for comment" with "in force" would overstate what carmakers must do today.
Honest limitations
Key facts here come from MIIT's consultation announcement, state-media explainers (CCTV, CNR/央广网, People's Daily-affiliated outlets), and industry commentary. I verified the comment dates, the mandatory-standard classification, and the February 2025 effective notice against the gov.cn text. I did not obtain the full draft standard text, so specific thresholds (for example, the exact disable duration) are reported from secondary coverage and should be treated as indicative. Critically, I could not confirm a final, adopted version of the safety standard as of the search date, so I have described it only as a draft for comment and have not implied it is passed or effective. Sales and penetration figures are attributed to industry data cited by state media, not to a primary statistical release.
What readers can do now
- If you evaluate or buy a driver-assist car in China, read the fine print on what the system is and is not — the pending standard is explicitly designed to stop "assist" being marketed as "autonomy."
- If you are a supplier or OEM, treat the draft's safety baseline as the likely floor, not a distant possibility; align naming, OTA filing, and driver-monitoring design now.
- Track the transition from draft to mandatory standard — once adopted, compliance becomes a precondition for market access, not just a reputational risk.