Tesla FSD is coming, but not really here yet | Focus Analysis

Written by Li Anqi

Edited by Li Qin

The highly anticipated landing of Tesla's FSD in China has finally made substantial progress.

On February 25, Tesla China officially announced the update of the FSD intelligent driving software.

Judging from the functional description, the "Urban Road Autopilot Driving Assistance" function that Tesla will push to users enables the vehicle to drive straight, turn left and right, make U-turns, and automatically change lanes on urban roads, etc.

(Source: Tesla Mini Program)

However, the Tesla customer service responded that this function is only an L2-level assisted driving and cannot yet achieve the fully driverless function of the US FSD.

This may be the reason why Tesla's official website changed the description of "FSD Full Self-Driving" to "FSD Intelligent Assisted Driving Function". Tesla emphasizes that in the future, users' vehicles will be able to complete the vast majority of driving tasks with minimal driver intervention.

(Source: Tesla Official)

But this is basically consistent with the main functions of FSD launched by Tesla in North America, and is also similar to the urban navigation functions of domestic automakers such as Huawei, Xiaopeng, and Li Auto. That is to say, after more than a year of rumors about the introduction of Tesla's FSD function into the Chinese market, it has finally taken a substantive step - starting to be delivered to vehicles.

FSD (Full Self-Driving in full) is Tesla's advanced intelligent driving assistance system, and it is also the basis of Musk's Robotaxi (driverless taxi) blueprint, which is the "trillion-dollar opportunity" in his eyes.

36Kr Auto learned from communicating with Tesla sales that car owners who are delivered FSD need to meet two conditions: First, vehicles equipped with Tesla's 4.0 chip hardware after October 2023. Second, they have purchased the 64,000 yuan FSD software package. Car owners who meet these two conditions will receive the function push one after another.

This salesperson told 36Kr Auto that the function push will be first oriented to users, and the store test drive vehicles have not yet received this push message.

However, the current functional version is probably not the "complete version" of Tesla FSD in North America and other regions.

Previously, Tesla CEO Musk said at the January earnings conference that Tesla FSD's entry into China has indeed encountered some challenges. "China does not allow us to upload the training videos to overseas, and the United States does not allow us to train the model in China. So we are a bit troubled now, and it can be said that we are in a dilemma."

For example, Tesla FSD has difficulty adapting to special scenarios such as bus-only lanes. For this reason, Tesla's intelligent driving team extracts signs and traffic rules from Chinese street videos on the Internet to train the intelligent driving model.

An intelligent driving engineer from a leading car-making company told 36Kr Auto that they have initially understood the actual performance of Tesla FSD function in China. "Not too worried, the level seems average for now." The other party said, but also admitted that with Tesla's technical capabilities, it is still worthy of vigilance over time. According to 36Kr Auto's understanding, many car companies' intelligent driving departments are trying to evaluate the actual performance of Tesla FSD in the Chinese region as soon as possible.

For Tesla, the delivery of "FSD" in the Chinese region is only the first step. To achieve the smooth intelligent driving and anthropomorphic performance of FSD in the North American region, Tesla still faces multiple challenges such as data accumulation, large model adaptation, and training computing power construction.

"Tesla FSD Has Arrived, But Not Completely"

Tesla has been planning for FSD for a long time. Since the establishment of the factory in Shanghai in 2019, Tesla's business ecosystem in China has been successfully opened.

However, the rapid iteration of its FSD has been out of reach for domestic users. Especially after Tesla FSD evolved to "end-to-end" intelligent driving in November 2023, it has established an evolutionary paradigm of massive data, huge computing power, and large model training.

Tesla FSD's entry into China has always faced a relatively high compliance threshold. An informed source told 36Kr Auto that previously, Tesla's plan was to export the collected intelligent driving data for training. "Tesla has been promoting this plan to the regulatory authorities, but the progress has not been smooth."

On the other hand, "Tesla also planned to put the computing power cluster in China, but the United States did not allow it. Maybe after the new government took office, the policy has loosened a bit."

Some foreign network users have observed that the version of Tesla FSD that landed in China this time is likely to be consistent with the current version in the North American region.

And the landing of Tesla FSD in China also means that Tesla has chosen to make local deployment and training of FSD. In the future, Tesla's intelligent driving team in China may collect data while delivering and debugging, entering an iterative rhythm similar to that of Chinese car companies' intelligent driving teams.

In fact, as 36Kr Auto previously reported, Tesla has already established a data annotation team and an operation team in China last year, and dispatched intelligent driving engineers from the US headquarters to China for training.

In the long term, as Tesla scales up to push functions to users, the evolution speed of FSD in China may become faster and faster, and its true capabilities will also be stimulated. This is worthy of the vigilance of Chinese counterparts.

Driven by Tesla, the realization of intelligent driving relying on large models, massive data, and training computing power has become an industry consensus.

For example, Tesla has built a data supercomputing center in North America that can accommodate 100,000 training graphics cards H100/H200.

However, Tesla may not be able to replicate this grand occasion in China. On the one hand, the high-performance graphics cards H100 and others used by Tesla are currently difficult to circulate in China. On the other hand, for Tesla, this is a repetitive hardware investment.

However, according to 36Kr Auto's understanding, Tesla has been in close cooperation with domestic cloud service providers. For example, in terms of data compliance, Tesla uses Baidu Cloud, and the desensitized data can be used for FSD model training, etc.; Tesla is also cooperating with Alibaba Cloud on cloud infrastructure; in addition, Tesla is also carrying out large model-related cooperation with Volcano Engine.

As for the data level, "Data is the greatest advantage." Many industry insiders told 36Kr Auto.

Cao Xudong, the founder of intelligent driving company Momenta, also told 36Kr Auto that the gold data content of Chinese roads is higher. If the intelligent driving model it trains can score 100 points in China, it can also score 70-80 points on European and Japanese roads.

And Tesla's millions of user car owners can provide a considerable and terrifying amount of data, which will quickly complement Tesla's scene database. The iteration of its intelligent driving model may also be accelerated as a result.

Although the path of FSD's entry into China may not be in line with Musk's initial vision, Tesla has no more time to prepare. Because the intelligent driving market in China is already surging, and Tesla has missed too many opportunities.

"Tesla FSD's Entry into China Can't Wait"

When BYD launched the "Intelligent Driving Popularization War" with a million-level vehicle scale, Tesla's signature ability FSD has not had many choices in terms of the timing of entering China.

Last year, Tesla's global sales experienced a rare decline, selling 1.789 million vehicles, a year-on-year decrease of 1.1%. The sales in the North American base and the European market decreased by 5.1% and more than 10% respectively year-on-year, while China is its market with the highest sales volume, with a year-on-year growth of 8.8%.

And the proportion of the Chinese market in Tesla's global market has reached as high as 37%, exceeding 35% in the United States. "Tesla China, this market is very large." Musk said at the January earnings call.

But in this market, the siege that Tesla's main models may face this year may be even stronger: The already ready-to-launch Xiaomi YU 7, the pure electric SUV i8 that Li Auto has just unveiled, and the Zhijie R7 and other model competitors are not weak. More importantly, the intelligent driving of these models is in the first echelon in China.

Especially after domestic established automakers such as BYD promote intelligent driving at the million-level, Geely, Chery and other automakers are also trying to follow up.

In other words, 2025 is the last window period for automakers to establish users' intelligent driving mindset. If Tesla FSD continues to lose the opportunity, it may miss the market. So even if the "full-blooded version" of FSD is not completely ready, Tesla has to take the lead.

On the same day as the launch of FSD, Tesla announced on the official platform that the first batch of refreshed Model Y vehicles is about to start delivery. Whether FSD can significantly boost sales remains to be verified.

On the other hand, the subscription charging model advocated by Tesla may also encounter certain challenges. Currently, the subscription fee for Tesla FSD in the North American region is $99 per month, and the buyout price is $8,000; in the Chinese market, the fee for FSD is 64,000 yuan.

However, the mainstream practice of domestic automakers is to include the cost of intelligent driving in the overall price of the new vehicle. "Buying a car with intelligent driving included" is the business ecosystem of intelligent driving products in China. Even BYD's 78,800 yuan Seagull model has high-level intelligent driving capabilities.

Users are still full of expectations for Tesla FSD. Some Tesla users have purchased the FSD function since 6 years ago, and a user who owns multiple Tesla models told 36Kr Auto: "When FSD is available, I will definitely buy it."

But if FSD wants to replicate the victory in the North American region, it needs to further adapt to the Chinese market in terms of technical products and business ecosystem.