China has launched a yearlong nationwide campaign to improve the quality and safety of intelligent connected vehicles, jointly announced 27 August by various government agencies including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Ministry of Public Security. Inspections will be conducted by state officials, covering connected-vehicle safety capabilities, automaker design and production processes, and whether finished products actually conform to what was approved for market access. The campaign builds on an existing MIIT inspection programme launched in May, under which regulators can pull sample vehicles and components directly from factories and dealerships, seal their hardware and software configurations, and send them for independent testing. These tests encompassed a range of criteria including crash safety, vehicle safety and battery-pack integrity. Companies found not to be complying can be publicly named, have their products suspended from MIIT’s approved catalogue—a necessity for local sales—or be outright barred from filing new models altogether. A central target is the practice of shipping new software features before they are fully validated and patching problems afterward through over-the-air (OTA) updates. Once a sample vehicle’s configuration is sealed for testing, automakers are now prohibited from altering its technical parameters via OTA. This closes an option that regulators have clearly identigied as a compliance loophole, rather than ordinary software development. MIIT Vice Minister Xin Guobin said a day before the campaign was announced that—without naming names—some “aggressive” innovations had already been installed without adequate validation. Further, he noted that that isolated quality and autonomous driving safety incidents had raised public concern. Several high-profile crashes have already triggered a government response; Xiaomi’s SU7 ADAS-related crash in 2025 paved the way for a clampdown on how such features are marketed; the Apollo Go robotaxi outage from April led to a three-month freeze on new robotaxi permits. Under the