Four Chinese ministries set a marketing code for innovative vehicle designs
MIIT and three sister ministries spent October 15 explaining their draft test-validation rule to more than thirty key manufacturers, reporting problems found in earlier inspections, and setting out four requirements, one of them a code for how innovative designs may be marketed.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published on October 16 that its first equipment industry department had met more than thirty key vehicle manufacturers the previous day, alongside the Ministry of Public Security’s traffic management bureau, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s atmospheric environment department and the State Administration for Market Regulation’s quality development bureau. The session explained the four ministries’ draft notice on innovative vehicle design and research-and-development test validation, reported problems found in earlier supervisory inspections, and set out four requirements.
The third concerns marketing. Companies are to conduct promotion truthfully and objectively, describe accurately the use boundaries, limiting conditions and test-validation status of innovative designs, make no false, exaggerated or misleading claims, not promote product functions using scenarios that break road traffic law, and not induce drivers to neglect their responsibility for safe driving. The other three require manufacturers to shoulder primary responsibility for safety and run test validation strictly to the draft notice’s requirements; to strengthen test-validation capability and complete safety assessments; and to build safety assurance capability for intelligent connected new-energy vehicles, improve production-consistency systems and tighten control across the supply chain. The meeting also called on companies to resist irrational competition.
The four bureaus said they would issue and implement the notice as soon as possible, accelerate revision of related standards, raise safety baseline requirements, continue supervisory inspections of key manufacturers, and deal with offending companies strictly and publicly. The draft’s comment period runs to November 10 and is still open; nothing in the notice says it will be shortened. MIIT’s equipment industry development center and CATARC also attended. The companies were not named.