On the morning of December 10, with 425/433 delegates in favor, the National Assembly passed the Law amending and supplementing a number of articles of 10 laws related to security and order. The law takes effect from July 1, 2026.
Notably, the Law on Road Traffic Safety and Order (TTATGT) has amended and supplemented regulations on child seats in cars.
Accordingly, the new law is passed, stipulating: When transporting children under 10 years old and under 1.35m tall in a car, drivers are not allowed to let children sit in the same row of seats, except for cars with only one row of seats.
Drivers must use and instruct on the use of appropriate safety devices for children, except for passenger transport business cars. This regulation will take effect from January 1, 2026.
Previously, the Road Traffic Safety Law stipulated: When transporting children under 10 years old and under 1.35m tall in a car, children must not sit in the same row of seats as the driver, except for cars with only one row of seats.
Drivers must use and instruct on the use of appropriate safety devices for children. This regulation will take effect from January 1, 2026.
Thus, compared to the old law, the new law has eliminated passenger transport business cars. These include: fixed-line passenger transport business, public passenger transport business by bus, passenger transport business by taxi, passenger transport business under contracts and new types of passenger transport business according to Government regulations.
At the same time, the implementation period of this regulation will be postponed to July 1, 2026 instead of January 1, 2026.
Another content, the newly passed law also stipulates that commercial vehicles used for freight transport, passenger transport vehicles with less than 8 seats (excluding the driver's seat), tractors, ambulances, and internal transport vehicles must install journey monitoring devices and images of the driver.
Passenger cars with 8 seats or more (excluding the driver's seat) must install a journey monitoring device, a driver's image recording device, and a passenger compartment image recording device.
The processing of data collected from driver image recording devices and passenger compartment recording devices shall comply with the provisions of the law on personal data protection and other relevant legal provisions.
In the report explaining, accepting and revising the draft law before the National Assembly passed it, the Government stated that through the current review, there are about 121,041 passenger transport vehicles with 8 seats or more that must install passenger surveillance cameras.
About 300,000 cargo vehicles and passenger vehicles with less than 8 seats must install cameras to record images of drivers.
This regulation is assessed to have initial costs, but the overall impact is assessed as positive, low cost but high efficiency, suitable for widespread application and bringing great benefits to businesses, passengers and state management agencies.
