China has released a draft mandatory national standard requiring commercial road transport vehicles to be equipped with LTE-V2X direct communication systems, and has opened it for public comment. The draft sets out a V2V warning for abnormal vehicles and a V2I warning for road hazards. In a simulated heavy rain and fog test, V2X warned the driver with a time-to-collision of at least seven seconds, while AEB failed to trigger. The proposal would move C-V2X beyond pilot deployment and into mandatory safety regulation, while helping China scale its chip, module, OBU and RSU ecosystem.

By Sang Min Han _  han@autoelectronics.co.kr
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Simulated rainfall of more than 50 mm per hour. Simulated fog with visibility down to 50 meters. A truck traveling at 60 km/h had a stationary target ahead of it. With LTE-V2X direct communication switched on, the driver received a warning with a time-to-collision of at least seven seconds and began braking. Under the same conditions, with V2X switched off and only the automatic emergency braking system (AEB) running, the test vehicle failed to detect the target at a sufficient distance. AEB never triggered, and the test vehicle collided with the target.
The result came from a test conducted at the Yancheng proving ground in China between January 14 and 29, 2026. According to the explanatory document accompanying the draft, participants included the Research Institute of Highway (RIOH) under China's Ministry of Transport, China Information and Communication Technologies Group, CICT Connected Technology, Huawei Device, Seres Auto, FAW Jiefang, and CATARC-affiliated testing institutes. In both truck-to-truck and truck-to-passenger-car scenarios at 80 km/h, warnings were issued with a TTC of at least eight seconds, and a chained warning from a roadside unit (RSU) through a truck to a passenger car also worked as intended, the document stated.
This result does not mean V2X is superior to AEB or replaces it. Nor does the draft standard require V2X to be directly linked to automatic braking. What Annex A of the draft makes mandatory is an audible warning to the driver, and in the Yancheng test, it was the driver who braked after receiving the V2X warning. The point is to provide a separate channel of information that reaches the driver earlier, at moments when visibility is blocked or sensors are not functioning properly.



What Was Released

China's Ministry of Transport has opened for public comment a draft mandatory national standard titled "Operational Safety Technology and Management Requirements for Road Transport Vehicles" (GB XXXXX—XXXX, draft for comment). Carrying plan number 20254333-Q-348, the standard is a mandatory national safety standard being drafted over a 22-month period, with technical oversight from the National Technical Committee for Road Transport Standardization (TC521). The main drafting work has been led by RIOH.
This is not yet a finalized standard. Its current status is public comment. It would therefore be inaccurate to say China has finalized an LTE-V2X mandate. The accurate statement is that China has included a mandatory LTE-V2X direct communication requirement for commercial road transport vehicles in a draft mandatory national standard and opened it for comment.
Chapter 1, which defines the scope of the draft, covers commercial passenger vehicles, commercial cargo vehicles, and combination vehicles made up of towing vehicles and trailers operating on Chinese roads. It is not a mandate covering every new vehicle and does not extend to ordinary passenger cars. Article 4.6, which covers LTE-V2X, applies to covered vehicles excluding trailers.
Drafting participants beyond RIOH include BYD, Yutong, Foton, Sinotruk, Dongfeng Liuzhou, XCMG, King Long, Zhongtong Bus, Huawei Device, and CICT Connected Technology, spanning vehicle makers, communication technology firms and testing institutes. Participation in drafting does not imply that each company fully endorses every clause or plans immediate mass adoption.



What Article 4.6 Requires

Article 4.6 of the draft standard states:
"Commercial vehicles, excluding trailers, shall be equipped with a vehicle information interaction system based on direct communication. The technical requirements for this system shall comply with GB/T 45315, and it shall provide vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety warning functions in accordance with Annex A."
"Shall be equipped" is mandatory language, not a recommendation or reference point. Annex A is designated as a normative annex, meaning it is not supplementary material but a binding part of the standard that must be complied with alongside the main text.
The communication method specified here is PC5 direct communication, in which vehicles exchange signals directly with surrounding vehicles and roadside units without passing through a base station or the cloud. According to the drafting explanation, this was chosen because warnings can still be delivered in mountainous or rural areas where cellular coverage is weak or absent.



Two Warnings,
Starting With Broken-Down Vehicles and Road Collapse, Not Autonomous Driving

Annex A of the draft standard specifies only two use cases.
The abnormal vehicle warning activates when a vehicle ahead transmits a Basic Safety Message (BSM) with the HazardLights or FlatTire flag set. The receiving vehicle must alert the driver with, at minimum, a voice warning. The test criteria require a time-to-collision of at least 7 seconds at 60 km/h and at least 8 seconds at 80 km/h, with at least 4 of 5 trials passing at each speed.
The road hazard warning activates when a roadside unit transmits information about road collapse or cave-in, icing, or a slippery surface. At both 60 km/h and 80 km/h, the system must deliver a voice warning at least 10 seconds before the vehicle reaches the hazard.
The drafting explanation notes that this 10-second figure was not derived from a single braking model. Road hazards have unclear boundaries and unknown severity, so drivers need additional time to decide whether to pass, detour, or stop. On top of that, a fully loaded truck traveling at 80 km/h needs roughly 7 to 8 seconds to come to a safe stop or take evasive action, and 2 to 3 seconds of margin were added on top of that to guard against rear-end collisions and uncertainty at the hazard boundary.
Annex A also specifies test equipment and test environment conditions in detail. The direct communication range for the target vehicle or target object used in testing must be at least 200 meters under open conditions free of obstruction or interference, and the end-to-end application-layer communication latency must be no more than 50 milliseconds. The test RSU is required to have a direct communication range of at least 300 meters.
The sub-30-millisecond latency the drafting explanation cites as a general technical characteristic of LTE-V2X, and the 50-millisecond figure Annex A sets as a test equipment condition, are different kinds of numbers.



Why Commercial Road Transport Vehicles Come First

The drafting explanation states that over the past three years, road freight vehicles accounted for more than 80 percent of major and above-threshold accidents, with nighttime accidents making up close to 50 percent. It also noted that accidents caused by rain, fog, and other poor weather have been rising. Incidents cited as examples include a multi-vehicle collision on the Yellow River Bridge, a disaster on the Meida Expressway's Chayang section, and an incident on the G30 Lianhuo Expressway, all of which exposed shortcomings in commercial vehicles' emergency response under conditions of low visibility and road damage.
The long routes and wide operating range of covered vehicles were also cited as a reason. Fully loaded trucks need longer stopping distances, and large vehicles often block the sensor view of vehicles behind them. Given the scale of accident risk and social cost involved, applying the requirement to commercial road transport vehicles first appears to be an approach meant to secure both safety benefit and industrial feasibility at the same time.



Not an Immediate, Across-the-Board Rollout

Chapter 8 of the draft lays out implementation in stages. The standard itself is expected to take effect 12 months after publication, and Article 4.6, covering LTE-V2X, would apply beginning in the 25th month after that effective date, and only to covered vehicles newly entering the road transport market. Under the draft, roughly three years would pass between final publication and actual application.
There is no basis at this point for reading the requirement as mandatory retrofitting of the entire existing vehicle fleet.



An Industrial Policy as Well

The drafting explanation does not hide its industrial aims. In the short term, factory installation on covered vehicles is meant to build a market; in the medium term, it is meant to drive mass production of chips, modules, onboard units (OBU) and roadside units (RSU); and in the long term, it is meant to lay a communication foundation for platooning and autonomous freight transport. The stated ultimate goal is to strengthen China's position in C-V2X technology and standards globally.
This is a safety regulation and an industrial policy at the same time, one that creates initial demand for chips, modules, onboard units and roadside infrastructure. As vehicle installation increases, the economics of building out roadside units improve, and as infrastructure expands, the value of installing the equipment on vehicles rises in turn. China appears to be using regulation to set the starting point of that cycle.



A Question Left for Korea

The approach China has taken is not a complete answer. Infrastructure cost, real-world interoperability, cybersecurity, false-alarm management, and the coexistence of new and existing vehicles all remain open questions. Still, China has begun putting concrete numbers on which vehicles, which functions, and which performance thresholds will apply.
Korea, meanwhile, has yet to turn its completed LTE-V2X trials into a fully funded nationwide rollout. Korea's discussion of C-V2X has, for a long time, repeated the same debate over communication method and infrastructure sequencing. The question now is not which communication technology is superior, but which vehicles and which safety scenarios to apply it to first. What remains is whether Korea can take a first step with narrow, concrete scenarios such as broken-down vehicle and road hazard warnings, what sequence it will follow in linking mandatory vehicle installation with infrastructure buildout, and how the proposed Chinese requirement will affect domestic commercial vehicle and parts makers exporting to China.
The seven-second warning the truck received at the Yancheng proving ground was not a victory for one piece of technology. It was closer to a wireless signal seeing what the camera could not. China has begun the process of moving those seven seconds from demonstration into regulation.

AEM(오토모티브일렉트로닉스매거진)