Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, has for years tried to persuade Chinese regulatory authorities to let him offer self-guidance opportunities in one of the company’s most important markets.
After a series of false starts, Mr Musk is now closer than ever.
Tesla said on Tuesday that some drivers in China will be able to use the company’s automatic pilot feature on the city streets to help with lane changes and other more advanced tasks. Cars that use the update, which is a similar characteristic of Tesla’s automatic pilot in the United States, are not entirely autonomous and still require supervision by the driver. The update is available to Tesla owners who paid an additional $ 8,800.
The news marked a major discovery for Mr Musk in China, where his company faced increasingly tougher competition. It is an important step towards Mr Musk’s goal of providing full self-guidance to China, which would help Tesla return some of the market share he has lost in recent years.
Mr Musk has identified autonomous driving technology as critical to Tesla’s future. The company has fallen back to China, where regulatory authorities are late to approve the latest self-guidance functions. Days after highlighting the importance of technology to investors last year, Mr Musk traveled to Beijing to meet with China’s employee Li Qiang. Shortly afterwards, Tesla was among a team of Chinese automakers to obtain approval for their data security precautions on some models.
Mr Musk has since been in power in the US government as an assistant to President Trump, who has been fighting with China for commercial policy.
Approval for the most advanced self-guidance technology would help “give Tesla three to five more years of leadership technology in China’s super-militant market,” said Michael Dunne, a car consultant and former director of General Motors.
Tesla was once the dominant player in China, extending to a market where privileges received a few other foreign businesses. These days, Tesla is struggling to keep the pace in China with local opponents. Its largest competitor, byd, recently announced an assisted driving system that uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technology.
Mr Musk works to persuade regulators to develop full self-guiding approval. But as Mr Musk recently described it to investors, Tesla is stuck between Chinese regulations that prevent her from getting data out of the country to train driving models and US authorities that will not let her train self-guide systems. in China.
While Tesla has a data center in Shanghai that has collected years of data from the cars it has sold to China, this information cannot leave the country. Tesla currently uses video from roads in China available online to inform his training, Mr Musk told investors for a recent profit call.
It is part of an issue related to the wider digital curtain drawn between the United States and China, as relations between the two economic forces are deteriorating. Last year, Biden’s administration effectively banned Chinese electric vehicles and software developed by Chinese used in internet -connected cars.
For Tesla, “the key is whether computing power training and other things can be detected in China,” said Cui Dongshu, Chinese’s Secretary General of the Chinese passenger cars. “If you do not create a computer center in China, you cannot calculate these things and you cannot adjust the capacity of Chinese roads.”
Lee He contributed research from Beijing. Claire fu He contributed a report from Seoul.
