Elon Musk is in China to talk about making cars fully self-driving.

Reports say that Elon Musk’s goal in Beijing is to talk about making Tesla cars in China capable of self-driving.

To train its algorithms, Mr. Musk wants to make Full Self-driving (FSD) possible in China and send data gathered there to other countries.

FSD is offered in some places, like the US, but not in China.

The news came after a study in the US linked Tesla’s self-driving modes to at least 13 accidents, one of which killed someone.

State media said that Mr. Musk told Chinese Premier Li Qiang that Tesla was ready to work closely with China to “achieve more win-win results” during a meeting with the Chinese leader.

Reports say that Mr. Li told Mr. Musk that the Chinese market would “always be open to foreign-funded firms” in answer.

China is the second most important market for Tesla. Xpeng, a car company based in Guangzhou, has been trying to compete with Tesla by adding similar self-driving features to their cars.

Mr. Musk called Chinese automakers “the most competitive car companies in the world” on Sunday.

Tesla has already taken steps to comfort Chinese officials about the rollout of FSD in the country. For example, it set up a data center in Shanghai to handle data about Chinese customers in a way that is legal in the country.

The trip happened a few days after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the United States said it would look into whether a recall of Tesla’s driving assistance system properly fixed safety issues.

As required by law, the NHTSA said that drivers “were not sufficiently engaged” in the crashes, even though they were supposed to keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take control at any time when autonomous driving was turned on. The regulator’s study was done before Tesla said it would fix the problem by recalling the cars.

Tesla’s software is meant to make sure that drivers are paying attention and that the feature is only used when it’s safe to do so, like when going on the highway.

For years, Mr. Musk has said that Teslas will be able to drive themselves and be used as “robotaxis.” He said in 2015 that Teslas would have “full autonomy” by 2018. And in 2019, he said that robotaxis would be up and running by the next year.

This month, Tesla’s CEO said that the company’s robotaxi would be shown off in August.

Critics say that Mr. Musk keeps talking up the idea of fully driverless driving to boost the share price of the company, which has been going down because of problems like less demand for electric cars around the world and cheaper competition from Chinese makers. Mr. Musk says the claims are false.

The prices of Tesla cars have been going down in China and other places to get more people to buy them.

“Tesla prices need to adjust often so that exhibition can keep up with the market,” Mr. Musk recently said on X, the microblogging site that used to be called Twitter and is owned by the billionaire.

Tesla recently said that sales of cars dropped 13% in the first three months of this year, to $17.3bn (£13.7bn).

Even though Tesla’s overall sales went down by 9%, its income dropped sharply to $1.13bn from $2.51bn in the same time last year.

Its share price has dropped by 32% so far in 2024.

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