China has put forward the rule that decides who gets the ticket when a driverless car breaks the law: the manufacturer. A draft revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law, submitted on 25 August 2026 for initial review by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, adds a dedicated chapter on autonomous vehicles to a statute that now runs to 9 chapters and 170 articles.
Under the draft, manufacturers or importers would handle road traffic safety violations committed while fully autonomous driving functions are activated. It is the first time China has legislated specifically for self-driving cars.
The distinction that matters for Tesla
The draft draws a hard line between autonomous driving and assisted driving, and Tesla sits on the assisted side of it.
Vehicles with assisted-driving features — the L2 systems that are everywhere in China today, FSD (Supervised) among them — continue to be regulated as conventional vehicles. Their drivers remain liable for violations exactly as now. Manufacturer responsibility attaches only when a genuinely autonomous function is engaged.
So for a Tesla owner in China, the immediate answer is that nothing changes. FSD is supervised, the driver is responsible, and this draft says so explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous.
The significance is forward-looking. Tesla has said it intends to move to unsupervised operation, and China is where it has been seeking permission to deploy FSD more fully. This draft sets out the terms of that transition: the day a Tesla drives itself in China without a supervising driver is the day Tesla starts answering for its own traffic violations.
What the draft does not settle
Two gaps are worth flagging, because they will determine how the rule works in practice.
The first is evidentiary. Deciding whether an autonomous function was active at the moment of a violation is the whole question, and the published summary does not explain how vehicle operating data would be accessed or what rules of evidence would apply in a dispute. That data sits with the manufacturer — the party with the strongest interest in the answer.
The second is that handling violations is not the same as bearing liability for crashes. The draft assigns responsibility for traffic offences; it does not automatically shift compensation for accidents onto automakers. Chinese legal commentary has been careful on this point, and so should any reading of it.
The draft is at initial review. Provisions can change through subsequent deliberations, and none of it is in force yet.
The contrast with Europe
The timing invites a comparison. Europe is deciding a related question from the opposite direction — the EU's Technical Committee votes on 6 October on whether to extend the Dutch approval of Tesla's supervised FSD across the bloc, an argument about whether a hands-off assisted system may be sold at all.
China has skipped past that debate and gone straight to the liability architecture for the fully autonomous case, while leaving L2 alone. The stated purpose is to give large-scale commercial robotaxi deployment a nationwide legal footing.
Two regulators, two problems. Europe is still asking whether the driver may take their hands off. China is writing down who pays when nobody is driving at all.