BEIJING, April 30 — Elon Musk made progress towards rolling out Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance package in China on a whirlwind weekend trip to Beijing, sending the company’s shares soaring more than 16 per cent on Monday.
The leap in Tesla’s stock added US$90 billion (RM423 billion) to the company’s market value, a major vote of confidence from Wall Street for the electric-vehicle maker as it struggles with soft demand and increased competition.
Key questions remain, however, on whether Tesla can secure government approvals to transfer data overseas that could prove pivotal in its development of autonomous vehicles.
Musk arrived in the Chinese capital on an unannounced visit on Sunday, intending to discuss the rollout of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software and the data-transfer permissions, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Among the wins during Musk’s trip, which was first reported by Reuters, was a key endorsement from a top Chinese auto association that said Tesla’s Model 3 and Y cars were compliant with data-security regulations. That would enable local governments to allow Tesla cars into parts of China they were previously barred from, Chinese media reported, citing a statement from Tesla.
Tesla has also reached an agreement with Baidu to use the Chinese giant’s mapping license for data collection on China’s public roads, according to two people, who described that as a step toward FSD rollout in China.
Musk’s meetings included one with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, who praised Tesla’s development in China.
Tesla did not comment for this report. Musk said this month on his social media site X that Tesla may make FSD available to customers in China “very soon”.
The question of whether Tesla can win Beijing’s approvals for overseas data transfer remains critical to its plans for FSD in China and for autonomous vehicles globally. Reuters could not determine what progress, if any, Musk made in securing such approvals during his Beijing trip.
Getting approvals in China to sell a so-called ‘level 2’ driver-assistance system such as FSD isn’t the hard part. But Tesla has considered the ability to transfer data out of China pivotal to its development of autonomous vehicles.
Tesla and other automakers use the data provided by their cars to train autonomous driving systems to perform increasingly complicated tasks without supervision from a human driver. Without Beijing’s approval for data transfer, Tesla could not use data collected by its cars in China to develop autonomous cars for a global customer base.
Despite its name, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving vehicle is not fully autonomous and requires drivers to stay ready to take over.
— Reuters
