China puts the brakes on driverless taxis. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Stuart Clarkson. Good morning. Plans to mass produce and sell self-driving vehicles in China have been delayed. It's after news spread of a crash involving one earlier this year. Surinjana Tuari is with us on Marketplace this morning. Hi,

Surinjana. Hi there. So this is a big turnaround in the plans for China, isn't it? That's right. And the

reason we know about it is because China's regulators last week gave the go ahead to just two out of nine

automakers that had submitted plans to sell self-driving cars. And even then the approvals

by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China were very narrow. They only allowed

further testing, really, rather than mass production. So these two companies, Beijing

Automotive Group and Chang'an Automobile in Chongqing, will be allowed to operate self-driving taxis on particular stretches of highway in each company's hometown.

And the taxis will not be allowed to change lanes while under computer control.

On any other roads, the taxis will need to be under the control of a driver.

And that's largely because of the crash that you mentioned, because the issue apparently was

that the self-driving car did change lanes. And what's the feeling in China about driverless

cars after news of this crash? It was quite a serious thing, wasn't it?

That's right. In March, this news spread very quickly and widely. It was a crash on a highway,

and it actually killed three women. Now, news of previous accidents involving assisted driving

had been suppressed by China's sensors, but it was really interesting that this one in

China's Anhui province did spread so quickly.

We're putting two and two together a little bit because it is China and information is very

tightly controlled. But because just these two companies have been given the approval,

experts are saying that this is a rolling back of what China is planning.

And remember, China is really pushing these new technologies.

We're hearing about robotaxies every other week.

And so it's really interesting that only these two companies have been given the approval to only test this driverless technology.

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