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SAMR: Never let marketing rhetoric cover up vehicle safety hazards...
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- DeepHorus
On October 22, Li Changqing, a second-level inspector of the Quality Development Bureau of the State Administration for Market Regulation, said at the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicle Conference that the industry must uphold the unity of innovation-driven development and safety-first principles. He made it clear that sacrificing safety in exchange for launch speed must be eliminated, and exaggerated and false advertising must be resolutely cracked down on. He also stressed that marketing rhetoric must never become a fig leaf for automotive safety hazards.
Li summarized the risk characteristics as three shifts. Risk forms are expanding from traditional ones to software algorithms, and OTA upgrades have become a new variable; defects are shifting from explicit and reproducible to digital and difficult to reproduce; and safety boundaries are extending from a single vehicle to the digital system ecosystem. Regulation will embed safety-first into the entire process of R&D, verification, and iteration, preventing radical innovation that lacks scenario validation from being put on vehicles.
The State Administration for Market Regulation, together with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, carries out normalized safety management, focusing inspections on products with high public attention and relatively major quality and safety hazards. At the same time, it rectifies chaos in automotive advertising, issues the Guidelines for Compliance with Price Behavior in the Automotive Industry, and cracks down on exaggerated advertising, false advertising, and vicious price wars. The policy direction is to push the industry from involutionary price competition toward competition on quality.
In September this year, the national standard Automotive Software Quality and Defect Management Specification was released, making special provisions for OTA recalls and including software defects in the same closed-loop management as hardware defects. In August 2025, two departments made it clear that OTA must not be used to conceal defects or evade recall responsibilities. On October 10, a draft for public comment from four departments directly targeted the chaos of quick-fix cars that compress validation cycles and replace real-vehicle testing with simulation testing.
Li disclosed that since the automobile recall system was implemented, more than 3,200 recalls have been carried out cumulatively, involving more than 120 million vehicles, and recalls affected by regulatory investigations account for more than half. From January to September 2026, there were 617 recalls of intelligent connected vehicles, involving 20.3938 million vehicles; 14.5268 million vehicles were urged to complete recalls, accounting for 71.23% of the total in the same period. More than 70% of recalls were advanced under regulatory pressure.
On October 16, four departments organized a symposium with more than 30 key automakers, requiring them to truthfully advertise usage boundaries and limitations, refrain from false, exaggerated, or misleading claims, and refrain from inducing consumers to neglect safe driving responsibilities. Li's statement clearly defined the policy direction as moving from price competition to quality competition. As standards, recalls, and market access requirements become better connected, full-process and whole-ecosystem regulation will be strengthened.
