China's MIIT spot-audits Chery, NIO and JAC on connected-vehicle safety

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology sent inspection teams to three automakers in Anhui province on July 30 and 31, examining production consistency and what the ministry termed intelligent connected vehicle safety assurance capability. The companies visited were Chery Automobile, NIO and JAC.

The ministry said the review covered the conditions attached to production access, including design and development capability and safety procedures. Inspectors randomly selected sample vehicles and power battery packs on site and transferred them to designated institutions for national-standard compliance testing.

MIIT said it would go on to strengthen admission review of what it described as radical innovation in vehicle design, and would require manufacturers to screen for safety risks, reinforce test validation, regulate their marketing conduct and hold the product safety line.

The announcement is short on procedural detail: it does not say what happens to a company that fails the compliance tests, nor when results are due. What it does establish is that the intelligent connected vehicle rules China has issued over the past two years are now being checked in person, at the factory, against physical samples rather than submitted documentation.

For carmakers, the exposure is structural. Production access governs whether a model can be built and sold at all, which places assisted-driving software and its validation evidence inside the same approval file as the vehicle itself.