If the national government sets the direction of travel, it is in local pilot schemes that the rubber meets the road. By 2024 more than 32,000 kilometres of road across China had been approved for testing autonomous driving of some sort. In Beijing, by the end of 2023 techies had clocked up 39m kilometres of testing, mostly on the capital’s outskirts. Wuhan handed out its first licences to fully driverless robotaxis in 2022; now passengers are able to hail them on one-third of its streets. This kind of real-world experience is crucial for ironing out kinks before technology goes national. “There’s more room for trial and error. If problems arise, you can reverse course quickly,” says Zheng Lin, a law professor at Dalian Maritime University, who studies autonomous driving.
The pilot schemes are not just a test bed for engineers. They promote innovation in rule-making too. Local officials in China are keen to make their hometowns hubs for new technologies, so as to attract investments and boost their own careers. To enable this, more than 50 cities have written their own competing policies on things such as liability in accidents, guidelines for responsible testing, and what subsidies they will make available to firms that test in their neighbourhoods. Even boosters admit that this has become a touch confusing. But it is nonetheless providing plenty of good and bad examples for lawmakers to learn from.
