A revision of China's Road Traffic Safety Law was submitted for first reading to the 24th session of the 14th NPC Standing Committee on Tuesday morning in Beijing. The draft runs to nine chapters and 170 articles and adds a dedicated chapter titled "Special Provisions on Autonomous Driving Vehicles."
The operative sentence
Where a road-traffic violation occurs while the autonomous driving function is in an activated state, it is the manufacturing enterprise or the importing enterprise that receives the enforcement action. The chapter also covers road-access conditions and an insurance regime for autonomous vehicles. The same draft carries a set of unrelated priorities — drunk driving, phone use at the wheel, abandoned vehicles, non-compliant e-bikes.
What the conventional framing gets wrong
Three things, and each one is load-bearing. First, violations are not liability. What the text assigns to the manufacturer is administrative enforcement — the citation, the penalty points, the fine. It does not say who pays when a person is injured. Headlines reading "China makes carmakers responsible for autonomous accidents" have quietly swapped a traffic ticket for tort law. Second, this is a first reading, not a law. Chinese legislation of this scale normally moves through two or three readings across separate sessions before adoption, and the autonomous chapter is the most contested part of the text; nothing is in force and the wording that survives may not be this wording. Third, and most consequential, it exempts the entire installed base. The rule only bites when a genuinely autonomous function is activated. Vehicles sold in China today with "smart driving" and navigate-on-autopilot packages are assisted-driving systems, and the draft explicitly places them back under conventional-vehicle rules.
Read as a clearing operation, not a punishment
Framed correctly, this is not a thunderclap aimed at Chinese carmakers. It applies to almost no vehicle any of them has sold, and to a great many they intend to sell. Regulatory uncertainty about who absorbs the citation is one reason Chinese manufacturers have kept shipping Level 2 systems with Level 3 marketing. Writing the answer into the national traffic law — rather than leaving it to city-level pilot rules in Shenzhen and Beijing — is a precondition for consumer L3 at scale.
The contrast worth holding
It also sets up a direct divergence with the United States, where this year's approach has run through exemptions and enforcement actions rather than statute.