Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off a surprise trip to China, Reuters has reported.
A private jet linked to Musk landed in Beijing on Sunday, a flight tracking app showed, as two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that the Tesla CEO was kicking off a surprise visit to the automaker’s second-biggest market.
As per the report, 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.
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 US. The US 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 X.
This came just over a week after Musk scrapped a planned visit to India to meet with PM Modi, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.” “Unfortunately, very heavy Tesla obligations require that the visit to India be delayed, but I do very much look forward to visiting later this year,” Musk said in a post on X on May 20.
