Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicks off surprise trip to Beijing: Sources
Tesla CEO Elon Musk landed in Beijing on Sunday, a flight tracking app showed, as two people with knowledge of the matter said the billionaire was kicking off a surprise visit to the automaker's second-biggest market. Musk is seeking to meet senior Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the rollout of Full-Self Driving (FSD) software in China and to obtain approval to transfer data collected in the country abroad to train algorithms for its autonomous driving technologies, one of the people said.
Tesla has since 2021 stored all data collected by its Chinese fleet in Shanghai as required by Chinese regulators and has not transferred any back to the United States.
The U.S. electric vehicle maker rolled out FSD, the most autonomous version of its Autopilot software, four years ago but has yet to make it available in China despite customers urging it to do so.
Musk said this month Tesla may make FSD available to customers in China «very soon», in response to a query on social media platform X.
Rival Chinese automakers such as Xpeng have been seeking to gain an advantage over Tesla by rolling out similar software.
Musk's visit to China was not flagged publicly and the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak with media. Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
The trip came just over a week after he scrapped a planned visit to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing «very heavy Tesla
