Recently, according to Bloomberg, Tesla has started localizing the FSD function for the Chinese market and plans to push a software update that will enable assisted driving on city streets in the next few days.
This upgrade will give the vehicle core capabilities such as recognizing traffic lights, autonomously changing lanes, and handling intersections and ramps, but the system still requires continuous monitoring by the driver, which is basically aligned with the functional level of the current version in the North American market.
Tesla showroom, December 19, 2024.
It is worth noting that this function unlocking is only open to users who pay 64,000 yuan to purchase the FSD kit, and is initially limited to certain models. Tesla specifically embedded a disclaimer in the update instructions, emphasizing that the temporal and spatial effectiveness of the function implementation may vary depending on the vehicle configuration.
Although Tesla's artificial intelligence team announced that it will launch the China-Europe FSD implementation plan in the first quarter of 2025, regulatory approval remains the biggest variable.
Although FSD is not officially available in the Chinese market yet, Tesla sells the FSD kit for RMB 64,000 and also provides Enhanced Autonomous Driving (EAP) for RMB 32,000 as a transitional solution.
Faced with China's complex traffic scenarios, Musk complained about the special challenges of the bus lane management mechanism at the earnings conference: the automatic capture system during the period of stray entry poses a severe test to the autonomous driving decision-making algorithm. This localization problem, coupled with the ban on cross-border data flow, forms a double technical shackle.
In the eyes of foreign media, Tesla's FSD system approval has also evolved into a new bargaining chip in the struggle between the two countries. According to a report by the Financial Times last week, Chinese regulators regard Tesla's FSD landing license as a strategic asset to deal with the US tariff offensive. This trillion-dollar trade game is opening up a second battlefield in the field of smart cars.
As the world's largest new energy vehicle market, China is the only region where Tesla maintains sales growth, and it is related to the lifeblood of Musk's business empire. However, under the double pressure of the US government's ban on AI training in China and China's restrictions on cross-border data transmission, Tesla has to rely on public street view videos and simulators to promote FSD research and development. This situation of "dancing in shackles" is extremely challenging for its technology iteration speed.
Musk said at the earnings conference that the "dilemma" of FSD on data compliance issues in China and the United States has become a dead end. Although he predicted that "unsupervised" autonomous driving could be achieved by the end of next year, this entrepreneur, who is accustomed to setting aggressive timetables, has never fulfilled similar promises in the US market in the past six years.
When local automakers such as BYD launched intelligent driving solutions that compete with FSD, the competition landscape of China's new energy market is being reshaped. For Tesla, FSD is not only a technological moat, but also the key to maintaining its trillion-dollar market value. The Chinese market access qualification determines whether it can have the right to speak in the future of autonomous driving.
It is worth noting that the R-UniAD end-to-end autonomous driving technology route released by AI technology company SenseTime at the Global Developer Pioneer Conference on February 22, with world model + reinforcement learning as the core, has created a new paradigm in the field of intelligent driving. The training method that allows the autonomous driving system to autonomously explore driving strategies in virtual scenes reduces the data demand by an order of magnitude compared to Tesla's reliance on the return of 7 million real car data. The technical route has been verified through real car interaction and is scheduled to be demonstrated at the Shanghai Auto Show in April. The mass production plan is expected to be delivered by the end of 2025.
Judging from the speed at which the Chinese are racing against time, the market doesn't have much time left for Tesla and others.
