China’s long-awaited mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving has finally got a launch date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened the draft for public comment, and for the first time the rules carry the weight of law rather than a recommendation. Products that miss the bar cannot be built or sold, and breaking the rule is a violation, not a footnote. The standard takes effect on 1 July 2027.
The shift from voluntary to mandatory redraws the whole competitive map. For years the game was shipping functions first. Now it is about proving safety, stability and the ability to keep iterating across the full life of a vehicle. Architecture choices made today have to still clear the bar in 2032.
Several carmakers have already put high-compute driving chips on the road, and a clear signal is emerging: for L3 and L4, a high-compute architecture is no longer optional. Algorithms have moved from hand-written rules to AI-native routes, with end-to-end models, world models and vision-language-action frameworks taking over. That change makes compute demand climb exponentially.
Horizon Robotics founder Yu Kai laid out the cadence plainly: hands-off driving for 100 per cent of scenarios by 2028, eyes-off L4 by 2030, and sleep-off autonomy by 2035. XPeng chief He Xiaopeng is more aggressive, seeing L4 or even L5 within three to five years.
Peng Xueming, a senior engineer at Desay SV, puts a number on the floor: 2,000 TOPS is the entry ticket for an AI-native L3 system, and L4 pushes the whole vehicle agent toward 6,000 TOPS or more.
No single chip today reaches that. The industry first answered L3 with a two-chip brain-and-cerebellum split, pairing a big compute chip with a small one for safety redundancy. But for L4, Desay argues, two big compute chips sharing one software stack is the better answer, letting a car move from L3 to L4 without rebuilding the platform from scratch.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Che Dong Xi report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. Source: Che Dong Xi.