Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and owner of the social media site
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
BEIJING – Local Chinese authorities have lifted restrictions Tesla Cars after the company’s China-made vehicles met the country’s data protection requirements, the automaker said on Sunday.
The breakthrough came when Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing for an unexpected meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang during the city’s first major auto show in four years.
Although Tesla’s electric cars are among the most popular vehicles in China, they have reportedly been banned from some government-affiliated properties amid concerns about the data the U.S.-based automaker can collect.
Tesla’s press release did not specify which local authorities had lifted restrictions on the cars. The Biden administration announced earlier this year an investigation into whether imported cars from China pose a risk to national security because of their potential to collect data about the U.S. and send it back to China.
Tesla’s vehicles weren’t the only ones that met privacy regulations.
In addition to Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, there are several new energy vehicles from BYD, lotusNezha, Li car And Nio China’s data security requirements have been met, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China said on Sunday.
The new data security requirements for “connected vehicles” were published in November and apply to cars released in 2022 and 2023 that automakers voluntarily submit for inspection, the center said.
The rules check whether the cars anonymize facial recognition data outside the vehicle, do not collect cockpit data by default, process that data in the car and clearly inform users about the processing of personal data. Tesla was among the first automakers to meet data compliance requirements.
Tesla said in its press release that it localized data storage at its data center in Shanghai in 2021 and passed the ISO 27001 international standard for information security after an audit by third-party auditors.
Musk’s visit to China on Sunday also raised expectations that Tesla’s Full Self Driving driver assistance software would soon be available in the country.
However, Junheng Li, CEO and head of research at JL Warren Capital, said on X that launching a “supervised” version of FSD in China was “extremely unlikely.”
She noted the challenges for Tesla in supporting local operations of the software as a foreign company in China. Li said there is “no strategic value” for Beijing to support the domestic rollout of FSD when there are many high-quality local alternatives, such as: Xpengis the driver assistance software from.
Premier Li visited Xpeng and other companies at the Beijing auto show on Sunday and called for innovation and demand to boost production, state media said.
Tesla is not exhibiting at the auto show this year, as has been the case since a protester stood on one of its cars during the Shanghai auto show in 2021. The fair takes place annually alternately in Beijing and Shanghai and did not take place in 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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2024-04-29 02:07:45
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