Tesla offers an advanced driver assistance feature in many parts of the world called Full Self-Driving. As people who follow Tesla know, the system doesn’t achieve full self-driving; it’s an SAE Level 2 technology that requires, in Tesla’s own words, “that the driver pay attention to the road, their surroundings, and other road users,” with “constant monitoring” necessary. So long as the human in the driver’s seat is prepared to jump in when needed, FSD can handle driving duties in many scenarios—but never before for owners in China. That’s now changing, as Tesla is finally launching an FSD-like system in the country, that interestingly goes by a different name.
The official update note for Tesla vehicles in China calls it “Autopilot automatic assisted driving on urban roads,” which certainly couches the system considerably more in its actual capabilities than “Full Self-Driving” has elsewhere. Tesla describes its function as follows (translated by Google):
“Using Autopilot automatic assisted driving on controlled roads (main roads where road users enter and exit through ramp entrances and ramp exits) and urban roads will guide the vehicle to exit the ramp and intersection according to the navigation route, and identify traffic lights at intersections to go straight, turn left, turn right, turn around, etc. And automatically change lanes according to speed and route. When the navigation route is not set, the optimal road will be selected according to the actual situation of the road.”
Autopilot automatic assisted driving—let’s call it “AAD”—can navigate city streets, which makes it a great deal more capable than the company’s previous technologies available to drivers in China up until now. However, it isn’t as good as what we know as FSD yet, because Tesla hasn’t yet amassed the wealth of training data in China that it has here. Reuters explains that the data its cars capture in the country is heavily regulated and must stay inside China’s borders, which has posed a challenge to Tesla in developing the system more quickly. In the meantime, its engineers have been “looking at videos of streets in China that are available on the internet and using that footage for training,” per Bloomberg.
AAD appears to be on par with a “mid-tier version” of Chinese EV maker BYD’s God’s Eye system, according to Reuters. (That’s how you do naming, Tesla.) As such it’s lagging behind the degree of autonomy that domestic automakers have been able to achieve in the region, but Tesla struck a deal last year to access Baidu’s mapping data to make up ground. If it ever can and, if so, how long that’ll take, are questions we don’t yet know the answers to.
We also don’t know why Tesla isn’t marketing this FSD-but-slightly-worse system as FSD in China. It can’t be down to capabilities—or at least Tesla’s own assessment of its capabilities—as the company started using the FSD name five years ago when the technology was obviously less sophisticated than it is now. Perhaps it decided that using that branding would look even worse in China, where competitors already have it beat, or perhaps all this has something to do with the law.
Last year, Tesla renamed FSD (Beta) to FSD (Supervised) after a string of lawsuits around the world claiming false advertising. That’s a more appropriate moniker given the system’s limitations, even if the (Supervised) part sort of contradicts all the words before it. One study found, for example, that FSD requires human intervention once every 13 miles on average. Taking all that into account, Autopilot automatic assisted driving seems like the right name. But then we never would have passed off remote-controlled machines with human voices piped in as autonomous, AI-powered robots, so clearly we wouldn’t last long at Tesla’s marketing department.
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