Musk made a surprise visit to China, and Tesla said that it would accelerate the implementation of autonomous driving technology

The Paper

2024-04-29 08:22Posted on the official account of Shanghai The Paper

Tesla's FSD is expected to accelerate its landing in China.

According to CCTV News, on the afternoon of April 28, at the invitation of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. of the United States, arrived in Beijing.

According to CCTV, Premier Li Qiang met with Musk in Beijing. Li Qiang said that Tesla's development in China can be called a successful example of Sino-US economic and trade cooperation. Facts have shown that equality and cooperation and mutual benefit are the best interests of the two countries. We hope that the US will work with China in more common directions, follow the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, and promote the sustained and stable development of China-US relations. China's hyperscale market will always be open to foreign companies. China will continue to work hard to expand market access and strengthen service guarantees, so as to provide a better business environment and stronger comprehensive support for foreign-funded enterprises, so that enterprises from all over the world can invest in China with peace of mind.

Musk said that Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory is Tesla's best-performing factory, thanks to the hard work and wisdom of the Chinese team. Tesla is willing to further deepen cooperation with China and achieve more win-win results.

On the evening of the 28th, Tesla issued a document saying that it will continue to cultivate in China, develop together with the industry in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, energy storage and other fields, accelerate the implementation of clean energy and autonomous driving technology, and turn a beautiful vision into reality.

This is Musk's second visit to China after a year. According to foreign media reports, Musk's sudden visit to China is aimed at promoting the implementation of Tesla's intelligent driving system FSD (Full-Self Driving) in China.

Tesla FSD needs the Chinese market

On April 28, foreign media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Musk is seeking the possibility of launching FSD in China and transmitting data overseas to train the algorithm of his self-driving technology.

A few days ago, Musk revealed that Tesla may soon offer the full self-driving software feature FSD to Chinese customers.

On April 20, Musk replied to a user's question on social media platform X about when Tesla would launch FSD in China, saying, "It may happen soon." ”

Tesla launched FSD four years ago, but it has never been able to get off the ground in its second-largest market in the world.

For Tesla FSD, consumers in the Chinese market have been waiting for a long time. Tesla also urgently needs the "killer feature" of FSD to attract the attention of more Chinese consumers.

In the first quarter of this year, Tesla's revenue and net profit both declined, and its global deliveries were also significantly lower than Wall Street's expectations, at 386,800 vehicles, down 8.3% year-on-year and 20.1% month-on-month.

At the same time, the Beijing Auto Show is in full swing, with Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and BYD shining at the auto show. The rapid rise of these Chinese competitors has also put tremendous pressure on Tesla China.

Autonomous driving has become a reassurance given by Musk to investors.

Based on the layout of large-scale mileage, self-developed computing platform, and huge computing power, Tesla's intelligent driving software FSD (Full Self-Driving) has entered the V12.3 stage. Tesla said that fully autonomous driving is only "one step away" from reality, and once its large-scale commercial use is implemented, it will become Tesla's lucrative "cash cow".

In the FSDV12.3.1 version pushed by Tesla to North American car owners in March, Tesla has introduced "end-to-end neural network" technology, through deep learning of more than one million driving data, using artificial intelligence technology to influence vehicle control, such as operating steering wheel pedals, turn signals, etc., rather than hard-coding every driving behavior.

Musk has said that 6 billion miles of driving is an important node to achieve a qualitative change in fully autonomous driving systems. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla's FSD total mileage has reached 1.25 billion miles (about 2 billion kilometers), which is far more than the sum of other companies. Tesla expects that at the current rate, the cumulative mileage of FSD is expected to reach 2 billion miles by the end of May and a total of 6 billion miles within a year.

On the other hand, China, as Tesla's second largest market in the world, has more than 1.7 million Tesla vehicles. The driving data of these 1.7 million vehicles is also very valuable for Tesla.

Since 2021, Tesla has been required by regulators to store all data collected by its vehicles in the Chinese market in a data center in Shanghai, and has not transmitted any data back to the United States. Previously, Tesla China has repeatedly emphasized that the data it collects in China will strictly comply with China's laws and regulations on data management and achieve local storage.

Expanding the coverage of FSD is already a top priority for Tesla. In order to further promote the coverage of FSD, Tesla has recently announced a reduction in the monthly subscription price and package purchase price of FSD in the United States. The FSD subscription price dropped from $199 to $99 per month, and the FSD package purchase price dropped from $12,000 to $8,000.

Tesla is expected to become the "catfish" of the industry again

In recent years, it is precisely because FSD cannot be used in China that intelligent driving has become a major advantage of Chinese competitors such as Xpeng and Wenjie compared with Tesla.

In China, the first-tier players that are more recognized in the industry generally include Xpeng, Ideal, Jiyue (Baidu), NIO, Huawei, etc. At present, the intelligent driving competition of domestic OEMs has entered a white-hot stage. Xiaopeng, Ideal, Jiyue and other car companies have shouted the slogan of "the whole country can drive" in urban areas in 2024.

The above-mentioned FSD's "end-to-end autonomous driving model" has also become an industry consensus, and domestic players have followed suit. For example, NIO plans to launch end-to-end-based active safety features in the first half of this year, and Xpeng also said at the launch conference of the Chinese New Year Smart Driving Event in January 2024 that the end-to-end model will be fully available in vehicles.

The CITIC Securities Research Report believes that although there is still a lot of room for improvement in the actual driving experience, in order to seize the minds of consumers as much as possible in the rapidly narrowing time window, all OEMs are accelerating function research and development, product landing and marketing promotion.

A number of research reports believe that if FSD successfully enters the Chinese market, it will become a strong competitor for the autonomous driving solutions of China's local car companies, and is expected to become a "catfish" in the domestic autonomous driving industry again.

According to Wang Yao, assistant secretary-general and director of the technology department of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, Tesla has obvious technical advantages in autonomous driving.

Wang Yao mentioned in a speech last year that pure vision allows Tesla to unswervingly take the low-cost perception route, because Tesla has a huge data advantage, and having enough data is equivalent to having enough experience to train algorithms. Except for Tesla, most of the enterprise data resources are seriously insufficient, and they have to adopt the converged perception technology route. Compared to Tesla, it will always be at a disadvantage in terms of cost. When the car companies that take the route of integrated perception technology run this road through and reach the level of autonomous driving L4 and L5, everyone has already "beaten" the cost of sensors such as lidar, and Tesla can also use it at that time, and Tesla still has a greater data resource advantage than other companies.

It is worth noting that on May 12, 2023, Chen Kele, deputy director of the Intelligent Manufacturing Promotion Department of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, introduced that in the next stage, Shanghai will further deepen its cooperation with Tesla, promote the layout of autonomous driving, robotics and other functional sectors in Shanghai, and jointly build a technology industry cluster with core technology advantages and facing the global market.

The industry believes that this means that Shanghai is likely to become the first stop for Tesla's FSD to enter the Chinese market.

FSD is implemented in China, and data collection is regarded as one of the keys.

When it comes to data storage, Tesla has just made new progress. On April 28, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the National Computer Network Emergency Technology Processing and Coordination Center issued the "Notice on the Testing of 4 Safety Requirements for Automotive Data Processing (First Batch)", and all models produced by Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory meet the compliance requirements: anonymization of face information outside the car, no collection of cockpit data by default, in-vehicle processing of cockpit data, and significant notification of processing personal information. Tesla said that Tesla has passed the authoritative standards and requirements for national vehicle data security, which is conducive to the full lifting of the ban on driving and parking restrictions on smart cars such as Tesla (such as government agencies, airports, highways, etc.).

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