Last week, Yale Dong finally got his chance to test Tesla’s much-heralded Full Self-Driving (FSD) autonomous navigation feature in China. He did so in a US$32,100 Model 3.
The experience was underwhelming, the Shanghai resident said, as the Model 3 failed to read lane markings and traffic lights several times on the public road, performing worse than Xpeng’s 220,000 yuan (US$30,285) P7, which he bought a year ago.
“It was like a foreigner in China, getting easily lost because of the complex roads,” he said, adding that the P7’s Navigation Guided Pilot (X NGP) was “far superior”. Tesla’s FSD was “not as efficient as a human driver. At times I felt nervous when it changed lanes and overtook slow-moving cars. A human driver is better able to read traffic conditions and make quick decisions.”
Dong’s feedback explains a little why Tesla has fallen off the perch as the king of electric vehicles (EVs) in China, a little over four years since the first China-made Model Y rolled off the assembly line at Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai. Xpeng and several dozen Chinese EV makers – especially BYD, which has outproduced and outsold Tesla since last year – are nipping at Tesla’s heels in the world’s largest and most competitive vehicle market.
China’s EV brands are crammed with the latest gizmos, from BYD Lingyuan’s roof-mounted drone to the gesture-sensing touchless car door on the Huawei Aito and BYD Yangwang U9’s tank turns. And all of them are fitted with fast-charging batteries and priced competitively with regard to Tesla’s models.
Out of the cacophony, autonomous driving is the one drum beat that every Chinese EV brand is marching to. Even Wang Chuangfu, the founder and chairman of the world’s largest EV maker BYD, has relented, installing self-driving modes on 21 different models for free, less than two years after brushing off the technology as “nonsense” and “hokum”.
