An autonomous car is tested in Beijing in March. (Photo: CHENG GONG/FOR CHINA DAILY)
Beijing Electric Vehicle Co has a similar timeline. It plans to finish developing and testing fully autonomous cars before 2025, but said they are unlikely to hit the road in large numbers before 2028.
Those estimates are in line with the view of PwC consultancy subsidiary Strategy&, which predicts that highly or fully autonomous cars will become a reality in daily lives from around 2027.
Policymakers in China are paving the way for development of the technology that is believed to take center stage in future transportation.
Local authorities in Beijing released the country's first guideline on road tests of autonomous vehicles in December and unveiled a closed testing ground for autonomous cars in February.
The 13-hectare facility, composed of up to 100 different road conditions and situations, is the first of its kind nationwide, according to the Beijing Daily newspaper. The capital city is scheduled to open a second, larger one in June.
Developers must pass tests up to 5,000 km in such closed facilities before they can go on to conduct road tests, according to Beijing Electric Vehicle Co.
Currently working on Level 3 autonomous functions, BJEV said it will start testing its model, Lite, in April in the closed facility.
Local authorities in several other cities, including Shanghai and Chongqing, came up with regulations on self-driving car tests, since the country unveiled its ambition.
China expects cars with some autonomous functions to account for half of new vehicles sold by 2020, according to a guideline released by the National Development and Reform Commission in January.
In order to improve and perfect the legal system for self-driving technologies, the government will speed up its drafting of regulations for public road tests of autonomous driving and revise the current road safety regulations "when conditions are mature", according to the plan.
Progress is made in infrastructure as well. Zhejiang province will finish building China's first expressway that fully support autonomous driving before 2022, according to a Xinhua News Agency report.
Some industry insiders urge players in the segment to take a gradual approach to improve the technology.
Wu Zhixin, vice-president of the China Automotive Technology & Research Center, suggested that companies should first promote widespread use of lower-level functions, like autonomous parking, which is easy to realize in simple scenarios like parking lots.
"If we promote them, then more people will use them. When more people use them, carmakers will have returns on investments so they will have the money to invest further in research and development."
Yale Zhang, managing director of the Shanghai-based consultancy Automotive Foresight, said China may gain a head start in autonomous driving based on a combination of factors.
"In the past two years, we have seen more professionals in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, the government is placing a lot of emphasis on it, and Chinese people are open to such new technologies, so it is likely for China to stand out."
TUV Rheinland, an international quality and safety testing service provider, has found that the Chinese public is more optimistic about autonomous driving, based on a survey of more than 1,000 licensed drivers ages 18 and above in China, Germany and the United States.
The findings, which were released in February, show that more than 63 percent of respondents in China believe driverless cars will increase road safety, while the figure is 34 percent in Germany and the United States.
But the respondents said they wish to be able to decide for themselves when to let a car drive autonomously and when to control it themselves.
