China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the final text of GB 44721-2026, "Safety Requirements for Autonomous Driving Systems of Intelligent Connected Vehicles," on 4 August. Xinhua carried it at 12:26 UTC. It upgrades the voluntary GB/T 44721-2024 to mandatory status — the first binding national rulebook for L3 and L4 systems in the world's largest car market.
What it requires
The core requirement is performance-based rather than prescriptive: an automated system must be "at least as safe as a competent and attentive driver performing the dynamic driving task." L3 systems must monitor driver readiness to resume control. L4 systems must manage risk on their own and explicitly may not depend on remote assistance. Automated parking is out of scope.
The lidar claim is wrong
A claim circulating widely holds that the standard mandates camera-plus-radar redundancy at L3 and lidar at L4, banning pure vision. The published text does not mention lidar at all, and specifies no sensor hardware whatsoever — it sets outcomes and leaves the sensor suite to the manufacturer. XPeng's Yu Tao confirmed as much publicly. The separate "10-second takeover window" figure in circulation comes from draft-stage coverage and is not verifiable in the released standard.
Three dates, not one
Approval by the market regulator came on 30 July; formal release was 4 August; the standard binds new type approvals from 1 July 2027 and existing models from 1 August 2028. Nothing takes effect now. Nor is this a licence to operate robotaxis — it is a product-safety prerequisite for type approval, a separate matter from the permits that authorise commercial driverless passenger service.
Context
Combined L2 driver assistance now reaches 70.5% penetration in China, with navigation-on-autopilot features at 34.2%. A public comment period ran 17–24 June.