MIT Technology Review

submited by

Style Pass

2024-07-11 06:00:04

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to China. New government permits let companies test driverless cars on the road and allow cities to build smart road infrastructure that will tell these cars where to go. In short, there are a lot of changes taking place. And they all point in the same direction: There’s an immense appetite to make autonomous cars a reality soon. And the Chinese government, on both the central and local levels, has been a major force pushing for it.

First of all, Tesla got the approval for its FSD feature (rather misleadingly named, since it still has lots of restrictions) after it entered into a deal with the Chinese AI company Baidu to map the country.

As I reported last summer, in the absence of Tesla FSD, Chinese EV makers were already starting to offer their own driver-assistance programs to help the cars navigate in cities, but they still often look to Tesla for assurance on what technology or strategy to use. The official entry of FSD, which is reportedly set to be rolled out in China sometime later this year, will surely bring another round of competition to the country’s auto market.