Tesla Pushing To Deploy Full Self Driving In China & Establishes Data Centre

Tesla is making progress in bringing its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology to the Chinese market. According to CarNewChina, Tesla is putting together a team of about 20 people to spearhead the adoption of FSD in China. FSD has thus far only been made accessible in beta form in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

According to the report, Tesla is also developing a data annotation team in China, with roughly a hundred workers led by engineers from the company's US headquarters. The role of this team will be to label and tag data in order to aid the training of algorithms for the Full Self-Driving system. This procedure is critical for assisting machine learning algorithms in better comprehending and categorising data.

Tesla has announced the creation of a data centre in China to store vehicle data generated by Tesla vehicles sold in China. The establishment of this data centre is the result of growing worry from the Chinese government over the Tesla Sentry mode feature. Tesla’s have recently been barred from parking at Yueyang's Sanhe Airport, as well as from Chinese military bases, due to worries over the Sentry mode feature's data security.

Sentry mode, which is intended to protect parked automobiles, captures environmental data around the vehicle when it is unattended. Tesla stated that Sentry mode data is saved offline on the car's hard drive and is only accessible by the vehicle owner.

Local start-ups and technology companies are actively researching self-driving technology of late, which has increased competition in China's autonomous driving sector. Furthermore, brands like Xpeng and Geely/Baidu are pushing forward to achieve Level 4 autonomous driving. The most difficult challenge, however, is navigating the Chinese government laws for testing autonomous vehicles.

In the Malaysian market, Tesla has so far only launched the Model Y in three variations, with the Full Self-Driving package available as an RM32,000 add-on feature. It is important to remember, however, that those who opt-in for this feature will not be able to use it on Malaysian roads because the FSD beta has not yet been launched here. It would be prudent not to choose this feature right now because it can be acquired at a later period when it becomes available locally, as all it takes is an over-the-air (OTA) update to activate it.