China’s industry ministry unveiled a roadmap on 10 September as part of its 15th Five-Year Plan for the automotive industry, targeting 70% new energy vehicle (NEV) domestic market penetration by 2030, as well as mass deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on highways, urban expressways and selected city roads. The plan requires AVs to achieve higher safety levels than human drivers, although it stops short of setting a specific numerical target for autonomous deployment itself.

China’s previous five-year plan, issued in 2021, targeted just 20% NEV share by 2025, a figure the country blew past to reach 54% last year, according to China Passenger Car Association data. The new 70% target looks likely to arrive ahead of schedule too: NEVs already accounted for 65% of car sales in August, with rising fuel prices attributable to the war in Iran likely to continue pushing those numbers higher in the future. 

Beijing regulators want to see several Chinese automakers ranked among the world’s top ten by sales, a group BYD, SAIC and Geely already reached last year. However, all three still trail far behind Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai. The plan also calls for China to gain a stronger voice in setting international automotive standards, and directs the ministry to issue guidelines supporting automakers as they expand overseas and deepen cooperation with foreign companies on vehicle and component research.

The roadmap pairs that growth ambition with an explicit push to curb the overcapacity straining China’s domestic market. The ministry wants to discourage overinvestment, encourage industry consolidation—that is, less automakers—and eliminate inefficient production, while strengthening antitrust enforcement and curbing what it called inappropriate incentives from local governments. The measures would serve as a direct response to the price war that has eroded margins and, alongside a 21% decline in car sales over the first eight months of this year, raised safety and quality concerns—particularly around connected cars and autonomous driving.

China’s emphasis on scaling autonomous driving also lands as a notable vote of confidence after new robotaxi permits were frozen for almost three months this year, following an outage involving Baidu’s Apollo Go fleet in Wuhan. The plan’s approach to autonomy also diverges structurally from the West’s: rather than relying primarily on standalone vehicle sensors and onboard compute, first- and second-tier cities will be required to roll out connected roadside sensors and 5G vehicle-to-everything infrastructure, sharing the computing burden between the vehicle and centralised municipal cloud systems.

The plan calls for new cell chemistry standards specifically covering solid-state batteries, alongside improved recovery of lithium, cobalt and nickel from recycling. It separately signals a shift in how autonomous driving software itself gets built, favouring end-to-end AI models intended to reduce reliance on costly HD mapping and highly elaborate sensor stacks over time.

China’s infrastructure-first approach to autonomy, building smart roads rather than relying solely on smarter vehicles, represents a notably distinct third model alongside the vehicle-centric philosophies expounded by Waymo and Tesla. Whether that infrastructure investment actually accelerates safe deployment, or simply shifts cost and complexity from the car to the city, remains an open question.