MIIT said inadequately validated vehicle designs will be barred from the market

Xin Guobin, a vice minister at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told a State Council Information Office briefing on August 26 that the ministry had drawn up a five-year plan for the intelligent connected new-energy vehicle industry covering 2026 to 2030.

Setting out the problems the plan is meant to address, Xin said irrational competition remained prominent, that some aggressive innovative designs had been fitted to vehicles without sufficient experimental validation, and that individual incidents involving vehicle product quality and autonomous-driving safety had drawn public attention.

Under the plan’s third strand, on industry governance, the ministry said it would reform the group-level management of carmakers’ production qualifications, strengthen market-entry review of innovative product design and the management of testing and validation, and strictly prohibit products that have not been adequately tested and validated from entering the market. It also said it would step up supervision of production consistency.

A separate strand on product quality commits the ministry to improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving, alongside the low-temperature performance and durability of traction batteries, and to advancing pilots for intelligent connected vehicle market access, road use and vehicle-road-cloud integration.

Xin said new-energy vehicle sales, a category that includes plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles as well as battery-electric cars, had risen to 16.49 million over the previous five-year plan, taking their share of new car sales from 5.4 percent to 47.9 percent.