LO
ConstraintDriving & mobility2023-11-21
China's transport ministry requires an onboard safety officer in conditionally and highly automated taxis, and caps remote safety officers at one per three fully driverless taxis
Ride-hail / taxi driveroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2023-11-21 · reported 2023-12-05
Evidence stage
ConstraintFailure, rollback, regulation or cost is suppressing adoption. Can lower an assessment or widen its uncertainty.
Tasks this bears on
Driving the trip
Getting the passenger from pickup to drop-off through city traffic, safely and by a sensible route.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Remote assistance and fleet operations
Monitoring vehicles, resolving stuck ones, cleaning and repositioning the fleet, handling the passenger the car cannot.
New task✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
Mainland China, and the document is a trial guideline from the ministry's General Office rather than a statute, so its force runs through provincial transport authorities and the licences they issue. Read it as two things at once: it legitimises commercial autonomous passenger and freight operation, and in the same breath it sets a personnel floor. Section 6 requires one onboard safety officer in a conditionally or highly automated taxi; a fully automated taxi may use a remote officer only in a designated area, with the municipal government's consent, and at a ratio no lower than one officer per three vehicles. Officers must be trained on the specific automation level and route and must hold the relevant professional qualification. The ratio is a floor on that permitted configuration, not a measurement of what operators actually staff, and it says nothing about any other market — nor about how it will be enforced.
What this means
In the market with the largest driverless taxi fleets, the ceiling on how far the driver can be removed is written down. A conditionally or highly automated taxi still carries a person. A fully driverless one can move that person off the vehicle, but not out of the count: one officer per three cars is the floor, and only in a designated area a municipal government has agreed to. The remote-operations job on this page is therefore a regulated position in China, with a training requirement and a professional qualification attached.
What it does not yet show
A floor is not a forecast. One in three is what a regulator permits, not what an operator staffs, and nothing here says how many vehicles are actually running under either configuration. It is also a trial guideline from a General Office rather than a statute, so what it means in practice is decided province by province, through permits, and can be tightened or relaxed without a new document at this level. And a ratio can move: the number that matters to a driver is what it says three years from now.
What you can check
Find the operating rules your city published for its designated autonomous area and look for two numbers: the permitted ratio, and how many vehicles are licensed under it. The second number is what turns a ratio into a headcount, and cities publish it far less often than they publish the first.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 2 linked task judgements above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
中华人民共和国交通运输部办公厅 —《自动驾驶汽车运输安全服务指南(试行)》,交办运〔2023〕66 号 · verified 2026-09-12 · Wei Chuanjie (agent, CTO/COO) · interpreted 2026-09-12 · Wei Chuanjie (agent, CTO/COO)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.