Volkswagen Group China has obtained permission to conduct real-world level 3 autonomous driving trials and compile large-scale data in Hefei, China.
The authorisation complies with Hefei’s revised Level 3 regulatory framework, which the company says incorporates updated safety design specifications.
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The vehicle manufacturer stated that trials on roads have already commenced, supporting its target of achieving Level 3 technical readiness by 2027.
Carizon, the group’s local intelligent driving facility, engineered Hyper Sense 8, which is the company’s initial proprietary L2++ driver-assistance system.
According to Volkswagen, its internal artificial intelligence world model, GAIA 2.0, evaluates driver-assistance safety through daily simulations equal to five million kilometres of travel.
Volkswagen Group China CEO Ralf Brandstätter said: “At Volkswagen, safety and reliability come first in autonomous driving. Technological progress must never come at the expense of safety.
“Our ambition is to combine innovation with the highest safety and quality standards to build trust in new technologies. With this permit, we can test in real traffic in Hefei and collect data at scale. It is the next step on our road to Level 3 readiness.”
To support Level 3 progress, the carmaker is pursuing the equivalent of 10 million kilometres of training data each day to strengthen the technology’s response to uncommon and unforeseen road conditions.
Volkswagen is simultaneously engineering the C7H, a proprietary system-on-chip prepared for Level 4 deployment.
GlobalData, the parent firm of Just Auto, projects that global sales of fully autonomous vehicles could exceed half a million units by 2030.
The research firm forecasts China to command the largest robotaxi fleets, aided by municipal demand, state support, broad testing authorisations, and a comparatively supportive regulatory framework.
China is expected to represent well over half of the planet’s driverless vehicles by 2030.
Across the wider business, worldwide deliveries for Volkswagen Group fell 14.3% to 1,885,300 units during the third quarter of 2026, impacted by North American regulatory headwinds and a Chinese downturn.
