According to media reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing on April 28, and Musk's move was interpreted by many media as a major benefit for Tesla's unmanned driving technology to be launched in China.
According to the latest report from Reuters, quoted by the global network, this is Musk's "unexpected visit" to China. Musk is seeking to meet with senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of Full-Self Driving (FSD) software in China, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Affected by this news, today's unmanned driving-related concept stocks collectively rose red, and the capital market's attention to unmanned driving was raised again.
In fact, as early as the beginning of this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla will release its long-promised driverless taxi on August 8. The reason why Tesla's driverless taxis are so concerned is that, according to an industry insider, on the one hand, Tesla's driverless vehicles have indeed accumulated a lot of patents and technical advantages, and at the same time, the cost of Tesla's driverless vehicles will be much lower than that of domestic driverless companies of the same type.
This kind of technology and cost advantage will naturally bring dimensionality reduction blows to domestic unmanned companies of the same type, and at the same time, for domestic online car-hailing drivers, Tesla's unmanned driving technology will also have a significant impact on the entire industry after it is popularized.
Most of the online car-hailing drivers believe that it is difficult to popularize unmanned technology in 10 years, after all, it is difficult to adapt to the complex road conditions in China, and unmanned driving is very testing the quality of passengers.
In fact, the idea of online car-hailing drivers is not unreasonable, although there are already large and small driverless enterprises in China, Baidu's radish run, as well as driverless-related solution service providers WeYuan Zhixing and other enterprises, but so far there is no truly fully driverless city. Even if driverless taxis have been launched in some cities, they have been piloted in a small area in specific areas and have not really been commercialized.
For thousands of online car-hailing drivers, the competition brought about by this technological innovation is also a dimensionality reduction blow, and the final decision on the competition between online car-hailing drivers and unmanned driving is still on the online car-hailing platform.
In fact, Didi has said as early as before that in the future, the Didi platform will retain at least 70% of the manned vehicles to provide services to the majority of passengers, so for online car-hailing drivers, the crisis caused by unmanned driving is there, but it will not be too big, because online car-hailing is a transportation service format after all, and the core of the service industry is employment on the one hand, and on the other hand, it cannot be separated from personnel to provide services.
Therefore, unmanned driving seems to be lively, but the actual large-scale application may only be in private cars.