Elon Musk's China Visit Pays Off

Author｜Wang Lei

Editor｜Qin Zhangyong

As anticipated, Musk's joint visit to China with Trump was far from fruitless.

Early this morning, Tesla took to the social media platform X to announce the availability regions for its supervised version of FSD (Full Self-Driving, Supervised).

The regions now include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, as well as select European countries like the Netherlands and Lithuania.

Notably, 'China' made its official debut on the list, marking a significant link between FSD and the Chinese market.

This signals that FSD is finally poised for its China launch.

However, Tesla has yet to announce a specific rollout timeline, and the actual user experience of this feature remains pending subsequent approvals. Nevertheless, the news sparked a surge in A-share intelligent driving concept stocks this morning, with many reaching their daily limits.

Even before its official launch, Tesla's FSD is already making waves.

01 Urgent Recruitment for Intelligent Driving Test Roles

While the official availability has been announced, there is still a regulatory approval process to navigate before domestic car owners can truly utilize this system.

It's worth noting that this isn't Tesla's first announcement of this kind. As early as last June, Tesla sent out a message claiming it was 'the only robotic car you can buy,' with FSD Supervised capable of taking users anywhere in countries like the United States, Canada, and China.

Shortly after, in November, Musk revealed at a shareholder meeting that FSD had only received partial approval in China and predicted full approval around February or March 2026.

However, FSD has yet to launch in China. But recent developments over the past two months suggest progress is being made.

A few days before Tesla's official tweet, on May 18th, Tesla's recruitment website posted approximately 90 core R&D positions, with a significant number related to intelligent driving testing.

These include roles such as intelligent driving test vehicle technicians, test engineers, and site test specialists, with work locations spanning Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, Tianjin, and Chongqing. Many of these positions are marked as 'urgently hiring.'

Most of these positions fall under the Autopilot R&D department, with job descriptions involving identifying functional improvements and performance degradations across software iterations. Candidates are required to travel domestically and internationally for field tests on public roads, test tracks, and verification sites. They must also stay abreast of changes in Chinese certification and regulatory requirements.

In terms of job requirements, candidates must hold a valid driver's license with over 3 years of driving experience, an annual mileage exceeding 10,000 kilometers, and no major accidents or violation records in the past year. Command-line operation experience or a racing background is preferred.

This large-scale recruitment of localized talent with strict driving experience thresholds strongly indicates that Tesla is making intensive preparations for FSD's local road testing and eventual launch in China.

Meanwhile, responses from official customer service also indirectly confirm that FSD is accelerating its entry into China. They stated that the company is actively pursuing approvals in accordance with national regulations and will roll out the feature to domestic customers as soon as approvals are secured.

They also emphasized that the current 'FSD Intelligent Driving Assist Function' priced at 64,000 RMB is not compatible with all vehicles, with some models only supporting the 32,000 RMB Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) function.

Additionally, in early May, Tesla updated the owner's manuals for some domestic Tesla models to version 2026.14, officially adding a complete feature introduction for FSD V14, suggesting that its technical groundwork is gradually being laid.

02 The Long-Awaited 'Game-Changer'

Judging by Tesla's continuous actions over the past month, it seems that FSD's launch in China is imminent. Now, the key questions on our minds are:

What capabilities does the latest supervised version of FSD currently possess? Will it suffer from the same 'climate sickness' (incompatibility with local conditions) as the FSD rollout in February last year, which was suspended after just one week?

Currently, the latest version Tesla has rolled out in the United States is FSD V14.3.3, released on May 17th, initially covering Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, and Cybertruck models equipped with AI4 hardware.

Musk previously described the V14.3 series as solving the 'last major piece of the puzzle' for autonomous driving, and the version likely to launch in China will probably be this one.

Starting with V12, Tesla entrusted perception and path planning to neural networks, meaning the system's decisions on its surroundings and navigation no longer rely on human-written rules.

AI neural networks directly handle the entire intelligent driving process. From receiving images from onboard cameras to issuing final steering wheel and pedal commands, the system no longer passes through any human-written rules—this is the unified end-to-end architecture often mentioned.

Under this architecture, there is no need to separately define modules like perception, planning, and control; the entire process is completed by a single neural network. To achieve this, Tesla increased the neural network's parameter count to about 10 times that of previous versions. A larger model can remember more diverse road conditions, such as irregular intersections, compound traffic lights, complex construction zone layouts, and non-standardized traffic signs.

In terms of vision and decision-making, the upgraded neural network visual encoder offers stronger 3D geometric understanding and traffic sign recognition in low-visibility and rare scenarios, enhancing responses to special objects like emergency vehicles, school buses, and right-of-way violators. It also improves handling of small animals and traffic light judgments at complex intersections.

Driving behavior has been refined, with greater handling of long-tail scenarios, reduced unnecessary lane biases and slight tailgating, more decisive parking spot selection, and a new predictive parking spot feature marked with a 'P' icon on maps. It also better handles temporary system degradations, reducing unnecessary interventions.

V14.3 also introduces explicit spatiotemporal memory capabilities to the FSD model for the first time, lasting about 3 to 5 seconds. Previously, FSD's decisions were more reactive based on the current frame.

This means the model can remember short-term dynamics like the acceleration and deceleration of the vehicle ahead, the speed limit on a recently passed road sign, or the movement speed of pedestrians at an intersection. This information informs subsequent trajectory planning and speed adjustments, making driving actions more coherent. Based on this, the vehicle no longer reacts frame by frame but has a continuous temporal perception.

The latest version also includes some optimizations for Smart Summon, now increasing the maximum speed to 8 mph (about 13 km/h), up from 6 mph (about 10 km/h), with Musk calling it 'a great version.'

Despite Musk's enthusiasm, the hardware generational gap presents a significant real-world challenge. Musk has publicly admitted that the HW3.0 hardware's memory bandwidth is only one-eighth that of HW4, unable to support the full FSD capabilities, achieving only 10% to 20% of its potential.

This means that older Tesla models produced between 2019 and 2023, even if FSD is approved, may not be able to use the full version. The official has explicitly mentioned that FSD V14.3 will currently only be rolled out to Tesla models equipped with HW4.0 hardware, while models with HW3.0 or lower can only receive the so-called 'V14 Lite' streamlined version of FSD.

This implies that even if approved, very few domestic models will truly be able to use the pure, full version of FSD.

In terms of localization scenario adaptation, given China's complex road environments and non-standard traffic scenarios, it remains to be seen whether FSD can perform as smoothly as it does in North America when facing unique Chinese complexities like unprotected left turns, mixed traffic with non-motorized vehicles, and reversible lanes. This still requires large-scale local data training and real-world testing verification.

Meanwhile, domestic advanced driving assistance systems are also rapidly improving. Domestic intelligent driving solutions, represented by Huawei ADS 4.0 and XPENG's second-generation VLA, have already matured in urban advanced driving assistance, with high-level intelligent driving features becoming standard in mainstream models priced around 200,000 RMB, even beginning to lay the groundwork for the L4 era.

Moreover, this morning, Liu Xianming, head of XPENG's General Intelligence Center, responded to the news of Tesla's supervised FSD launching in China during a group interview after the XPENG GX launch. He welcomed Tesla FSD's entry into the Chinese market and hoped for a direct comparison with Tesla.

In April, the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted Tesla FSD Supervised certification in the Netherlands, making it the first European country to officially approve this driving assistance technology.

However, RDW also explicitly pointed out that FSD Supervised is an L2-level driving assistance system that can take over many driving tasks but is not an autonomous driving system.

When L2-level FSD officially launches in China, will it still be a 'game-changer'?

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