Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) approval in China was a “home run” for the automaker as the stock has struggled for most of the year.
On the news, Tesla shares surged on Monday morning.
CEO Elon Musk made his way to China to meet with high-ranking government officials and the conglomeration resulted in what was one of the biggest bull signals for the company in recent memory: approval of FSD in the region.
Chinese officials confirmed to the Wall Street Journal this morning that Tesla’s FSD suite has tentatively been approved, as it cleared several regulatory hurdles that have kept it from releasing in China for the past few years. One of which was mapping, and Tesla is utilizing Baidu for this.
Now, analysts are commenting on the inclusion of Full Self-Driving in China, including Wedbush’s Dan Ives, who called it a “watershed moment for the Tesla story.”
There are several large developments that could come from Tesla gaining market approval in China for FSD, one of the largest being the fact that the automaker will gain even more data from its vehicles as they travel on the roads.
Tesla’s FSD suite gets better, smarter, and more accurate with every mile driven, and the suite accumulates millions of miles every day, all of which are taken in as data to improve the performance of its semi-autonomous driving suite.
“If Musk is able to obtain approval from Beijing to transfer data collected in China abroad, this would be pivotal around the acceleration of training its algorithms for its autonomous technology globally,” Ives writes in his note.
Tesla has also struggled with demand in China due to its prices simply being higher than other competitive brands. Chinese consumers are not necessarily interested in spending more money to have the Tesla name as the market is so saturated with competitors.
However, this development could help Tesla become more competitive as Chinese consumers might be willing to own the automaker’s cars just to try FSD. Its technology is likely appealing to most tech-interested car buyers, so it will give Tesla a leg up on the competition.
This could, simply enough, be a huge step forward in the road to regulatory approval of FSD in countries outside the United States, and could be Tesla’s biggest catalyst in years.
Wedbush kept its ‘Outperform’ rating and its $275 price target on the stock.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
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