Volkswagen Group China has obtained a Level 3 autonomous driving road test licence in Hefei, the company said on 26 October.
The permit was granted under China’s current L3 regulatory framework, which the company describes as the most demanding in the country, and it states that the approval fully meets the latest mandatory safety design standard. On that basis the group can run real-road L3 testing and large-scale data collection in Hefei. Testing has formally begun.
What the licence actually unlocks
A road test licence is not a product approval. It is permission to generate the data that a product approval will eventually depend on, and in China that permission is where the queue forms.
Volkswagen frames the permit as a key node in bringing higher-level autonomy to market and as progress toward L3 technical readiness in 2027.
The stack is local, and that is the point
Relying on its local smart-driving centre, Volkswagen Group China has already launched Hyper Sense 8, a full-scenario advanced driver assistance system.
Behind it sits GAIA 2.0, a self-developed world model. The group says it can run safety simulation equivalent to 5 million kilometres of real driving every day, drawing on real-world data from as many as 30 million scenario clips. With simulation support, the training mileage target for GAIA 2.0 is 10 million kilometres a day.
The stated purpose is the hard tail of the distribution: rare and sudden road situations that a purely road-driven data programme would take decades to encounter.
A separate programme is also under way. The group is developing its own system-on-chip, the C7H, which it says can support up to Level 4 capability.
The first China Tech Day is two days later
Volkswagen will hold its first Group China Tech Day in Hefei on 28 October, where it plans to present its latest technical progress in one block.
The timing is not accidental. A German OEM is staging its technology showcase in a Chinese provincial capital, two days after taking China’s toughest L3 test permit there, and the message is aimed as much at European headquarters as at Chinese buyers.
For European suppliers, the implication runs one way. The validation, scenario data and regulatory experience required to ship assisted driving at Chinese speed is now being produced inside China, by a German company, using a Chinese partner stack. That knowledge does not travel back to Wolfsburg for free, and it does not arrive on a European timetable.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://auto.gasgoo.com/news/202610/26I70475911C109.shtml.