Recently, Musk's visit to China has sparked market attention towards Tesla's autonomous driving. According to the latest news from the media, Tesla has proposed to launch an "unmanned taxi" in China. In this regard, the Chinese government may first support its testing and demonstration in China, but has not yet fully approved the full implementation of its FSD in China.
Regarding the above rumors, a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily attempted to verify and obtain more information from Tesla, but as of the time of publication, no response has been received.
"Autonomous Taxi", also known as Robotaxi, was announced by Musk in early April this year that Tesla will release Robotaxi products on August 8th. According to Bank of America analyst John Murphy, Tesla's Robotaxi event on August 8th will showcase FSD and the next generation platform.
According to interviews with the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, industry insiders generally indicate that, considering practical factors such as business models and road management, Robotaxi or autonomous driving is currently the first and most feasible scenario to be implemented.
In the view of Chen Rongfang, an analyst at Debon Securities, the launch of Tesla Robotaxi is expected to strengthen FSD's commercial monetization ability, feed back FSD's large-scale road test data, and thus form a positive double helix driving Tesla's continuous breakthroughs in autonomous driving.
However, there seem to be doubts in the industry about whether Tesla Robotaxi can be successfully implemented. Firstly, currently considered as the FSD that Robotaxi must rely on, the testing mileage seems to have not yet met the requirements. Musk previously estimated that Tesla's FSD testing mileage would need to reach 6 billion miles to meet global regulatory requirements. According to data released by Tesla on April 6th, the actual test mileage of FSD is 1 billion miles.
At the same time, the compatibility of FSD and Robotaxi on Chinese roads remains to be discussed, both at the technical level and in terms of responsibility recognition standards. A person in the autonomous driving industry chain told a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that although Tesla's highest level autonomous driving solution FSD (Full Self Driving) is translated as "completely unmanned autonomous driving," it is still at the L2 level of assisted autonomous driving, and the main responsibility is still human. It is an autonomous driving mode that optimizes the experience under the premise of human-machine co driving.
Founder of Chuangdao Hard Technology, Bu Rixin, further stated to a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that FSD and Robotaxi are two dimensions of things. FSD is an autonomous driving technology solution, while Robotaxi is a commercial operation model. "The difficulty and technical reliability of FSD autonomous driving are one aspect, and the determination of accident responsibility is also an important consideration factor, because most FSD autonomous driving is driven by individual car owners. Once an accident occurs, it is difficult to determine whether it is due to technical reasons or other factors, which can easily cause controversy. Robotaxi has an operating entity behind it, and most of the operating entities are related to car companies, so it is more motivated to assume accident responsibility."
Visiting Professor Zhang Xiang from the Yellow River University of Science and Technology told a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that both Robotaxi and FSD require a relatively long period of time to land. The problems to be solved include that the current road scene in China is different from that in the United States. "Tesla needs to do a lot of localized development based on the situation in China, and many models need to be adjusted, which takes a long time because the road conditions in China are more complex, with more people and vehicles, and the challenges for Tesla are also greater. Even if the technology is more mature, changing the scene may not be necessary."
In contrast, many domestic Robotaxi manufacturers, including Xiaoma Zhixing, Apollo Go, and Wenyuan Zhixing, have already carried out pilot or commercial operations for unmanned driving and manned vehicles, which may be a step ahead for potential new entrants to Tesla.
However, some insiders said that perhaps Tesla still has updated technical solutions for Robotaxi. The Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily has noticed that Tesla, which has always adhered to a pure visual route, has recently been exposed as the largest customer of a LiDAR company.
The latest released data shows that Tesla purchased over $2 million worth of LiDAR from Luminar Technologies in the first quarter of this year. Luminar stated in a letter to shareholders that Tesla was "our largest LiDAR customer in the first quarter, accounting for over 10% of our revenue for this quarter.". The company reported a revenue of $21 million in the first quarter.
Luminar CFO Tom Fennimore said during Tuesday's earnings conference call, "This is not their first time ordering LiDAR from us, but what I want to say is that this is not frequent, but intermittent. We can only guess what they are actually doing."
Regarding Tesla's entry into China, a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily expressed optimism about Tesla's entry into the Chinese market through interviews with multiple companies in the autonomous driving industry chain. Among them, a person in charge of an autonomous driving enterprise told a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, "This is a good thing. Let's make a big cake together, accelerate the user penetration rate and market capacity of intelligent driving." At the same time, he expressed his anticipation for Tesla's Robotaxi release in August.
Zhang Xiang, a visiting professor at the Yellow River University of Science and Technology, told a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that Tesla started early in the layout of Robotaxi, accumulated a lot of industry data, and related models are relatively mature, which can also play a certain driving role for Chinese autonomous driving enterprises. "Just like Tesla's entry into China ten years ago also drove the development of new energy vehicles in China."
On April 28th this year, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) issued a notice on the inspection of four safety requirements for automotive data processing (first batch). Among them, 76 models from six companies, BYD, Ideal, Lotus, Hezhong New Energy (Nezha Automobile), Tesla, and NIO, meet the four compliance requirements for automotive data safety.
The above documents show that the detection targets are intelligent connected vehicles launched from 2022 to 2023, mainly detecting four requirements: anonymization processing of facial information outside the vehicle, default non collection of cabin data, cabin data in the vehicle processing, and significant notification of personal information processing.
It is worth mentioning that both Tesla's domestically produced Model 3 and Model Y meet automotive data security compliance requirements, and are the only foreign-funded enterprise on the list that meets compliance requirements.
Meanwhile, since January 2020, Tesla has been equipped with Baidu Navigation Map on its infotainment system. The cooperation between Tesla and Baidu in advanced assisted driving maps and compliance clouds may accelerate the process of FSD landing in China.