At the end of April, Elon Musk, at the last moment, canceled a trip to India, instead showing up in Beijing, and snagging a deal to rescue Tesla. The results were immediate: The shares of the electric vehicle maker, which had been out of favor on Wall Street, soared on the news.
Now Washington has to be worried that China will control Mr. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which is critical to U.S. ambitions in space.
During his two-day trip to China, the second in less than a year, the billionaire announced that he had struck a deal with China’s Baidu on mapping and navigation software. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said in an April 28 statement that Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y vehicles had passed China’s data-security requirements.
In China, where car buyers are far more focused on tech features than Americans are, Mr. Musk has wanted to roll out Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software. Currently, his cars have only the basic “Autopilot” driver-assistance feature. Most observers assume he is on the glide path to Beijing’s approval.
Mr. Musk certainly needs the upgrade. Not long ago, Tesla in China was viewed as a standout. Now, that is no longer the case. BYD Co. and “an entire fleet of EV upstarts” are, in the words of Asia Times contributor Scott Foster, “increasingly making it look like an ordinary car company.”
As a result, Tesla’s market share is in a tailspin. A year ago, Tesla held the No. 1 ranking in China’s new-energy vehicle retail segment. In the first quarter of this year, the company had fallen to third place. BYD in that period sold 586,000 cars, Geely 137,000, and Tesla 132,000. It is not clear that Tesla can compete in China, where the regime does just about everything it can to favor Chinese competitors.
Mr. Musk knows that China is “the golden goose EV market.” Tesla’s “gigafactory” in Shanghai, which opened in 2019, is the “heart and lungs” of Mr. Musk’s car production. The facility is Tesla’s largest outside the United States. China is now Tesla’s second-largest market.
