Is Musk’s visit to China ＂Catfish＂ coming？ Did FSD accelerate its landing in China？

Tesla CEO elon musk visited Beijing on April 28th at the invitation of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. During this period, he met with Li Qiang, Prime Minister of the State Council, China. Li Qiang emphasized that Tesla’s growth in China is a model of Sino-US economic and trade cooperation, and reiterated China’s position of opening to the outside world, welcoming foreign-funded enterprises, including Tesla, to enjoy a better business environment and stronger support. Musk spoke highly of Tesla Giga Shanghai’s performance and expressed his desire to deepen cooperation in order to achieve more win-win results.

Tesla officially announced that the company will continue to develop in China, focusing on the fields of artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and energy storage, accelerating the application of clean energy and autonomous driving technology, and turning the vision into reality. Musk’s visit to China was speculated to be related to the promotion of the deployment of Tesla’s fully automatic driving system (FSD) in China, which has not yet officially landed in the world’s second largest market.

The market expectation for Tesla FSD in China is growing day by day, and Tesla also needs this technological advantage to attract more consumers in China. In the face of declining performance in the first quarter and fierce competition from China brands in the field of new energy vehicles, autonomous driving has become the key for Tesla to consolidate its market position. Tesla FSD technology has matured, adopting "end-to-end neural network" technology and training based on massive driving data, which is approaching the edge of large-scale commercial use, indicating a huge potential benefit.

Tesla has set up a data center in China to comply with local data management regulations and ensure that all vehicle data are stored locally. In order to accelerate the popularization of FSD, Tesla recently lowered the subscription and purchase price of FSD in the US market, showing its determination to expand the coverage of this service.

According to industry observation, if FSD can successfully enter China, it will challenge the local autonomous driving scheme and stimulate industry innovation and competition. Tesla’s remarkable advantages in autonomous driving technology, especially the data-driven pure vision scheme, keep it in the leading position even in the face of high-cost fusion sensing technology opponents. With the news of deepening cooperation with Shanghai, Shanghai may become the first place where Tesla FSD is deployed in China, and Tesla’s compliance progress in data processing has also cleared the way for the landing of FSD.