Japan's Level 4 Law — Driverless "Specified Automated Operation" Legalised

Level 4 automated driving (high driving automation) is the stage at which the system does all of the driving within set conditions and, when the conditions are about to run out or something fails, brings the vehicle to a safe stop itself instead of handing over to a driver; so no driver is needed. In Japan, the automated-driving provisions of an amended Road Traffic Act (Act No. 32 of 2022), passed in April 2022, took effect on 1 April 2023. They made driverless operation equivalent to Level 4, called "specified automated operation", legal on public roads under permits issued by prefectural public safety commissions. The first permit was issued on 11 May 2023 by the Fukui Prefectural Public Safety Commission for a mobility service in the town of Eiheiji, Fukui, which began running on 21 May. According to Japan's transport ministry (MLIT), by June 2026 Level 4 buses and similar vehicles had been put into service at 11 locations, largely through subsidy programmes, and 12 permits for specified automated operation had been issued.

The definitions of the levels are on the SAE J3016 page, and the 2019 amendments that allowed Level 3 on the Honda Legend page.

The permit system for specified automated operation

According to the National Police Agency, the system works as follows.

One of the criteria is that the service carries people or goods and is found to improve the convenience or welfare of local residents.

The vehicle standards differ too. According to MLIT, the Level 3 safety standard requires the system, when automated operation becomes difficult (a malfunction, a sudden change in weather and so on), to warn the driver to take over, so a driver is needed. The Level 4 standard requires it to stop safely in the same situation, so no driver is needed. A Level 4 service needs approval under the Road Transport Vehicle Act and a permit under the Road Traffic Act, and, if it carries passengers, a licence or registration under the Road Transportation Act as well.

Eiheiji: the first Level 4

The first case was a small cart running on part of the Eiheiji Mairo-do, a promenade in the town of Eiheiji, the product of trials run by MLIT and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The vehicle is a Yamaha electric cart modified by AIST that follows an electromagnetic induction wire laid in the road at 12 km/h over about 2 km. There is no driver either on board or at a remote site.

On 29 October that year the vehicle hit a parked, unoccupied bicycle. According to the town's investigation as reported by Jidounten Lab, the cart was moving at about 4 km/h and no one was hurt. Radar and other sensors had detected the bicycle, but at that spot the cart braked automatically only when the camera's image recognition agreed, a setting meant to avoid false alarms from oncoming vehicles, and the camera failed to recognise the unoccupied bicycle. Insufficient training data for unoccupied bicycles was among the causes cited; the town adopted measures including additional training and aimed to resume service in March 2024, after the winter break.

Spreading out, 2024–2026

An MLIT document of 8 June 2026 lists the 11 places where Level 4 had been put into service: Eiheiji (Fukui), Kamishihoro (Hokkaido), Kesennuma (Miyagi), Osaka (the Osaka-Kansai Expo), Matsuyama (Ehime), Hitachi (Ibaraki), Ota ward in Tokyo (Haneda), Shiojiri (Nagano), Taki (Mie), Kashiwa (Chiba) and Hitachiota (Ibaraki). Because Shiojiri received a second permit, the permit count is 12.

On 18 December 2024 Ibaraki Kotsu received a permit from the Ibaraki Prefectural Public Safety Commission for specified automated operation on the Hitachi BRT in Hitachi, which the company announced as Japan's first such permit for a commercial vehicle. From 3 February 2025 it began commercial Level 4 service over about 6.1 km of dedicated busway, which it described as the longest Level 4 route in Japan at the time and the first commercial Level 4 service using an ordinary medium-sized bus.

In the Kashiwanoha district of Kashiwa, Chiba, Tobu Bus Central received a permit from the Chiba Prefectural Public Safety Commission on 12 November 2025, and from 13 January 2026 began specified automated operation on some runs of the shuttle between Kashiwanoha-campus station and the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa campus. It uses a medium-sized bus on public roads shared with cars, pedestrians and cyclists; the consortium led by the University of Tokyo describes it as the first Level 4 service on public roads in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

For taxis in Tokyo, Waymo, GO and Nihon Kotsu have announced that they aim to run fully driverless service during 2027; that story is on the Waymo page.

Who is it for? Driver shortages and the economics

In its Digital Garden City Nation strategy (approved by the Cabinet in December 2022) the government set a target of automated mobility services at about 50 locations by around fiscal 2025 and more than 100 by fiscal 2027, and MLIT called 2023 the "first year of automated-driving deployment". The target is written as a number of "automated mobility services", so it is not necessarily the same measure as the 11 Level 4 locations MLIT reported in June 2026. According to an analysis by SOMPO Institute Plus, most of the projects subsidised in fiscal 2024 ran at Level 2, with safety staff on board.

Behind the push is a shortage of people to run local transport. An estimate that the Nihon Bus Association submitted to a government council in October 2023 found that maintaining 2022 service levels while meeting new caps on overtime (the so-called "2024 problem") would require about 129,000 bus drivers in 2030, against a projected 93,000, a shortfall of about 36,000 (28%). The association warned that without enough drivers, route buses would be cut back or abandoned. Driverless Level 4 is expected first of all to fill that gap.

The economics, though, are hard. In an April 2025 analysis, Mai Shinzoe of SOMPO Institute Plus noted that introducing a single automated vehicle is said to cost from tens of millions of yen to over ¥100 million, and that the national subsidy rate was falling from 100% to 80%. She wrote that supporting automated services from fare revenue is extremely difficult, and suggested that Japan's step-by-step approach, starting in low-risk restricted spaces, helps explain the gap with the United States, where driverless taxis run in city centres.

In Japan, Level 4 has been framed less as taking drivers' jobs than as making up for drivers who will not be there. Whether that framing holds depends on whether driverless operation can pay its way. More on AI and society is in the AI and society timeline.