At the 2026 China Automotive Industry Development (TEDA) International Forum on October 14, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it has taken the lead in issuing the 15th Five-Year Plan for the Intelligent and Connected New Energy Vehicle Industry, providing systematic guidance for the next five years of technology, industrial coordination and infrastructure.
To expand consumption, MIIT will implement auto trade-in subsidies, an NEVs-to-the-countryside campaign, and pilots to shore up county-level charging and battery-swap infrastructure, pushing charging stations and piles to full county coverage. It will also introduce management measures for auto modification, shifting policy focus from single-product promotion to building an innovation system and strengthening supply-chain resilience.
On intelligence, MIIT will deepen pilots for intelligent-connected vehicle market access and road use as well as 'vehicle-road-cloud' integrated applications, optimize production-access management, and support trusted data spaces and high-quality datasets. It will push the deep integration of artificial intelligence with the auto industry to empower digital-intelligent transformation across the whole value chain.
On the high end, MIIT will support key firms in tackling core technologies, improving low-temperature durability of power batteries and the safety and reliability of driver assistance and autonomous driving, and will tighten product-design access review, test validation and production-consistency checks so that only adequately tested, safe products reach the market.
Image: Next-generation EV charging infrastructure. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
