China to Set Communication Standard for Post-2018 Driverless Cars, Industry Official Says

China may soon have a common national standard for vehicle-to-vehicle communication among driverless cars.

According Reuters, this is what the chief of the Society of Automotive Engineers of China (SAE-China) said, adding China will revisit the 2018 "standards" for said communication.

China's aim to establish a national standard could speed the implementation of driverless cars in the world's biggest auto market. According to News 18, this is in contrast to the patchwork of state laws and standards in the US that some in the industry says may hold back development.

Earlier this year, SEA-China - under the direction of the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, plus input from major automakers - will try to interpret vague directives for the automotive industry in the sweeping 13th Five-Year Plan.

According to the Fiscal Times, this resulted to the lengthy 450-page roadmap, issued in November, that laid out specific policy objectives for every aspect of the automotive industry. This includes driverless vehicles and electric cars, for three five-year periods to 2030.

The document have stopped short of establishing a unified standard for cars to communicate with each other (V2V) and surrounding infrastructure (V2I), both of which are essential for the vehicles to be successful.

The country will finally answer these demands in 2018 in the next update of the roadmap, with a more exact standard to be developed between 2020 and 2025.

China's method of central unified planning could be more effective than countries such as Japan, which is struggling to make its "big three" automakers agree on the standards.

SAE-China chief Fu Yuwu said this is a necessity as we can't fundamentally use different channels of communications.

MIIT also announced the tightening of a subsidy program for green energy cars. Fu said the move will not get in the way of meeting targets of at least 7-percent of cars that are being sold by electric and plug-in hybrids by 2020.

By the end of the decade, the aggressive average fuel economy requirement will be 5-liters-per-100-kilometers for vehicles.