On March 31, 2026, China's intelligent connected vehicle industry reached a milestone event. Changan Automobile officially obtained an L4-level Robotaxi testing license, receiving unanimous approval from six departments in the Chongqing Yongchun Policy Pilot Zone, marking its full compliance in the field of autonomous driving testing.
The special nature of this license lies in its "full compliance" and "full scenario" coverage. After passing the strictest joint review in the pilot zone, Changan Automobile can conduct fully driverless testing without safety officers in designated areas. Changan's choice of Chongqing as the test site is clearly a deliberate challenge to the complex road conditions of this "8D magical city," including intricate interchanges, tunnels, steep slopes, and frequent foggy weather. If testing can be successfully completed in Chongqing, it will mean that its autonomous driving technology possesses extremely high adaptability and reliability.
The L4-level Robotaxi is not an isolated prototype. It is based on Changan Automobile's self-developed "Tianshu" end-to-end large model and shares the underlying algorithm architecture with production-level L2 and L3 models. This means that Changan's advanced autonomous driving technology already has the capability to move from small-scale testing to large-scale mass production. In 2025, Changan released "Tianshu Intelligent Driving," integrating core domains such as driving, cockpit, and chassis, including end-to-end navigation, multimodal AI models, distributed electric drive, and steer-by-wire chassis. It achieved independent control of all four wheels, reducing drive and brake response time to 10 milliseconds, lowering sideslip risk by 76%, and completing trajectory correction within 0.1 seconds after a tire blowout. In addition, Changan plans to increase the precision of its self-developed LiDAR to more than 200 lines in the third quarter of 2026, triple computing power, and reduce costs by 30% compared with peers, to further enhance recognition capability in extreme scenarios.
Changan's L4 license is not an isolated event, but the latest step in its advanced autonomous driving strategy. On December 20 last year, Changan had just obtained the nation's first L3 autonomous driving license plate, "渝AD0001Z." Just three months later, it completed the leap from L3 "compliant road operation" to L4 "driverless" testing. This pace reflects a profound divergence in the current industry roadmaps.
From late 2025 to early 2026, L3 pilot models from Changan and BAIC Arcfox received market access approval from MIIT and began road testing on designated routes. Meanwhile, some "leapfrog" players advocate skipping L3 and directly targeting L4 all-scenario autonomous driving. Behind these two routes lies a rational calculation of the commercial critical point: L3 resolves liability and insurance issues in human-machine co-driving, paving the way for regulation; L4 is committed to ultimately eliminating safety officers and seizing the commanding heights of future mobility services.Changan's strategy is more like a "dual-track parallel" approach. By mass-producing L3 models, it accumulates real-world data and user feedback, while using its Robotaxi license to conduct forward-looking L4 validation. This avoids both the "transition period" trap that a pure L3 route might fall into, and the problem of an overly long commercialization cycle inherent in a pure L4 route. The key lies in "technology commonality": L2, L3, and L4 share the same underlying algorithm architecture. Advances in higher-level capabilities can feed back into the assisted driving experience of mass-produced models, while data generated by mass-produced models continuously trains the higher-level models, forming a virtuous cycle.
In short, Changan Automobile has found a balance between commercialization and forward-looking development in autonomous driving through its "dual-track parallel" approach, offering the industry an alternative reference path.