Changan Automobile has been granted Level 3 autonomous driving product access approval as part of China’s first batch, allowing one of its passenger vehicles to operate single-lane automated driving on specified highway and urban expressway sections in Southwest China’s Chongqing.
The vehicle holding the recently acquired licenses for autonomous driving tests is the DEEPAL L07, recipient of the German Red Dot Award. This model is equipped with an L3-level traffic congestion autonomous driving system.
The system complies with various regulations and standards such as the “Classification for Automated Driving” and the “General Technical Requirements for Autonomous Driving Systems of Intelligent Connected Vehicles”, and UN ECE R157 ALKS. The development process spanned five years, aiming to create a high-performance autonomous driving product that not only prioritizes safety and reliability but also fulfills the genuine needs of users.
Autonomous driving is classified into six levels from Level 0 to Level 5. Level 3—commonly referred to as “conditionally automated driving”. This allows the vehicle to perform certain dynamic driving tasks under specific conditions, while requiring the driver to remain available to take over when requested.
According to a press release from Changan, the approval follows extensive system-level validation of CHANGAN’s Level 3 autonomous driving capabilities, supported by more than 5 million kilometers of real-world road testing.
Tests covered a broad range of driving scenarios, spanning 185 categories — 49 percent beyond regulatory benchmarks — with extreme conditions accounting for 36 percent of total testing.
On average, one complex risk scenario was encountered every 38.9 kilometers, demonstrating the system’s ability to operate safely and adaptively within its ODC (operational design conditions).
As one of the first two OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) to receive Level 3 product access in China, the approval represents a culmination of Changan’s more than four decades of vehicle manufacturing experience and its ongoing transformation toward intelligent mobility, the press release stated.
“The approval reflects CHANGAN’s safety-oriented, OEM-led self-development approach to Level 3 autonomous driving,” it stated.
Under the “SDA intelligence” Level 3 program, Changan emphasizes a full-lifecycle, closed-loop safety system designed to safeguard Level 3 operation from development through real-world use.
To demonstrate safety at an engineering level, Changan established an integrated development and validation approach for Level 3 autonomous driving that embeds safety requirements across system design, testing and operation.
The framework addresses four core areas — functional safety, SOTIF (safety of the intended functionality), cybersecurity, and data security — ensuring that automated driving functions are designed and verified with clearly defined boundaries.
Validation is supported by a combination of large-scale simulation, closed-course testing, real-world road testing, data-driven feedback loops and continuous safety monitoring. These efforts are underpinned by national-level intelligent vehicle safety research facilities and dedicated intelligent driving laboratories, providing comprehensive verification coverage from development to on-road deployment.
For operational safety, Changan operates a monitoring platform that has run stably for 18 months, with reported data accuracy maintained at 100 percent, and a 100 percent success rate in issuing safety warnings.
Changan stated that the platform conducts continuous, 24/7 cloud-based analysis of cybersecurity and vehicle operating risks, enabling real-time monitoring, early risk alerts, and coordinated response during on-road operation, ensuring that Level 3 functions remain within their defined operating conditions when deployed.
Changan operates a R&D network covering six countries and ten locations, supported by a team of more than 24,000 professionals from 31 countries, 44 technology research and product development centers, 20 technology companies and 180 laboratories.
Backed by more than CNY 60 billion in R&D investment and over 14,000 patent applications filed in the past three years, this infrastructure enables the agile and continuous evolution of CHANGAN’s intelligent driving technologies.
