China’s Reported Robotaxi Permit Restart Is Not a Return to Unrestricted Service

Shenzhen’s revised rules classify road access for intelligent-connected-vehicle testing and demonstration into four ascending complexity tiers. Source: Shenzhen Municipal Government.

Shenzhen’s rulebook governs several different activities

Momenta is an autonomous-driving company whose robotaxi program had testing activity in Shanghai, Suzhou and Wuxi before Shenzhen, the report says. It says Momenta announced on July 21 that it had received an intelligent connected-vehicle road-testing permit in Shenzhen, and separately relays Bloomberg’s characterization of it as one of the first permits after the pause.

That identifies Momenta’s immediate stake: adding Shenzhen to its testing footprint. It does not disclose the fleet size, the routes, whether a human safety operator will be in the vehicle, the duration of the permission, or a start date for a passenger service. Nor does the reporting state why Momenta was selected ahead of any specific competitor.

Shenzhen’s municipal government published an explanation of its revised implementation rules on June 25. The city says the rules cover road testing, demonstration applications, and unmanned testing or demonstrations. Nothing in that explanation ties the revision to the Wuhan outage or to the later reported licence restart; it presents the changes as an update to rules first issued in October 2022 as the sector moves toward larger-scale testing and unmanned exploration.

The rules add four road-access tiers: low, medium, high and ultra-high complexity. That matters because the policy’s unit of progression is not simply the number of vehicles a company owns, but the traffic environment in which it may validate the system.

Lower barriers, retained intervention requirements

The revised rules reduce some entry costs and duplicate testing:

• For a first application covering multiple vehicles, automated-driving-function testing is required for at least 2% of the vehicles, with a minimum of one vehicle.
• A first application for unmanned testing or demonstration can cover up to 50 vehicles.
• Vehicles in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology catalogue or a local intelligent-connected-vehicle catalogue can avoid a separate third-party consistency report if the applicant provides a consistency statement.
• Shenzhen may recognize road-test results obtained elsewhere.

Those measures can make it easier to apply and expand a test program, but they are not pricing terms or an authorization to carry paying riders without operational constraints. The same rules require participating companies to share traffic-violation information with Shenzhen traffic police, maintain a remote-monitoring platform and communications system, and be able to take over remotely or manually in an emergency.

The contrast is central to the event. A lower testing sample—2% of an initial multi-vehicle application, not 2% of a company’s whole fleet—reduces the required validation burden for that application. It does not remove the city’s requirement that an operator be able to intervene when something goes wrong.

What would turn a reported thaw into a measurable reopening

The next test is disclosure, not another broad claim about permits. Regulators or companies would need to identify the city, permit category, approved vehicle count, routes, operator requirements and commercial-use terms for each approval. A credible account of the Wuhan review would also need to state the system failure’s cause and the corrective measures required of Baidu or the wider sector.

Until that evidence is public, the available record supports two separate propositions: a report says permit issuance is gradually resuming in some cities, and Shenzhen has made a more detailed pathway for testing and demonstrations. It does not support treating either development as proof that unrestricted robotaxi service has returned.