Volkswagen China Secures Hefei L3 Permit, Targets 2027 Deliveries

Volkswagen Group China said on October 26 that it had obtained an L3 autonomous driving road-test permit in Hefei and had begun real-world road testing and data collection, according to CnEVPost. Test vehicles are being validated on "urban roads, expressways and other representative routes," with scenarios including complex intersections, roadwork zones and low-light conditions at night.

The permit is not a market-access approval. A chinaevhome report on the same announcement states that "the approval is a road-testing permit, not a vehicle market-access approval."

The work runs through CARIZON, a Beijing-headquartered joint venture between VW's software unit CARIAD and Horizon Robotics, established in December 2023. VW invested about €2.4 billion in the JV for a 60% stake. Under a "white-box licensing model," CARIZON "will independently develop a unified AI driving solution for Volkswagen's China market based on Horizon Robotics' AI foundation model," riding on Horizon's in-development C7H system-on-chip and the GAIA world-model data platform. The reporting notes that VW's simulation system, "GAIA 2.0, can run simulations equivalent to 5 million kilometers of real-world driving per day," with plans to scale to 10 million daily kilometers.

Frank Han, executive vice president of Volkswagen Group China, has said the company aims to "achieve L3 conditional autonomous driving in 2027 and L4 autonomous driving in 2029." Deliveries of the first L3 solution "could begin as early as the second half of 2027."

VW China holds its first Technology Day in Hefei on October 28. It is the latest in a crowded run of China-stack moves on our autonomous-vehicles tracker.