As is well known, Tesla (TSLA. US) CEO Musk is not only a tech giant and super rich, but also a traffic influencer who plays with traffic. Recently, two more events have made Musk a hot topic on the internet, attracting a wave of traffic.

On the one hand, Musk publicly diss LinkedIn and announces that its X subsidiary will launch competitors on the platform, instantly attracting many "melon eating crowds" to watch. On the other hand, Musk launched a live test drive broadcast of Tesla's auto drive system at the weekend. In this 45 minute live broadcast, he drove Tesla around Palo Alto, California, which happened to be the home of Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (META. US). In the middle of the broadcast, Musk also joked that he would go to Zuckerberg for a hand to hand fight.

It is worth mentioning that, in addition to the "melon eating crowd", Tesla has also attracted the attention of many investors, but their focus is not on Musk Dis LinkedIn or York Zack Burke, but on Tesla's FSD.

Self driving in the decisive battle! Will Tesla achieve fully autonomous driving by the end of the year?

Lei Jun from Xiaomi (01810. HK) once stated that autonomous driving is the key to the victory of intelligent electric vehicles and will be Xiaomi's core competitiveness. Based on the current situation, autonomous driving is indeed a competitive highland in the field of electric vehicles and one of the explosive points in the industry.

Morgan Stanley has stated that fully autonomous driving will become a reality in the coming decades and will have a profound impact on the automotive industry. The agency also predicted that by 2030, the sales of fully autonomous vehicle might exceed 10 million.

For autonomous driving, Tesla has been laying out for a long time, or is about to usher in a "butterfly change" moment.

FSD is an upgraded version of Tesla's Autopilot assisted driving function, which mainly includes navigation assistance (NOA), automatic lane change, traffic signal recognition, automatic parking, intelligent calling, and other functions.

In 2023, Tesla's autonomous driving system frequently received positive news.

On June 27th, Musk revealed on social media that FSD V12 will cancel its beta version. Beta generally refers to the test version of the software, and canceling Beta means that FSD has reached the standard of pushing to users.

On August 3rd, Musk posted on the "X" platform, mentioning that Tesla is expected to achieve fully autonomous driving by the end of this year. It is reported that Musk's "fully autonomous driving" refers to L4 and L5 level autonomous driving, which can complete a series of driving tasks through the vehicle's built-in algorithms without the need for driver control.

On the recent weekend, Musk drove a Tesla while driving in Palo Alto, California and used FSD Beta V12 live streaming.

On this journey, Musk only intervened with the vehicle once, and although driver supervision is still required, the performance of the FSD Beta V12 is still commendable.

Currently, Tesla car owners need to purchase FSD first, make a one-time payment of $15000, or pay a monthly subscription fee of $199. Then you can apply for the FSD beta version. Car owners can obtain testing qualifications based on their driving safety scores.

Tesla plans to promote FSD entry into China, what is the situation in the domestic autonomous driving field?

It is worth noting that with Musk's first visit to China in three years, there were rumors that Tesla FSD would accelerate its entry into the Chinese market.

On August 15th, media reported that Tesla is forming a local operations team of about 20 people in China to promote the implementation of autonomous driving solution FSD in the Chinese market.

In addition, the report also stated that Tesla will also attempt to establish a data annotation team in China, with a scale of about hundreds of people. This is also preparation for training FSD algorithms.

Although such news has spread, Tesla FSD still faces some "thresholds" for entering China. For example, the model trained by Tesla FSD is not based on Chinese road and vehicle conditions; The laws and regulations between China and the United States are different; There is also some controversy regarding data management.

However, from the perspective of some domestic institutions, CITIC Securities has previously analyzed in relevant research reports that the trend of Tesla FSD entering China is becoming increasingly clear, which is expected to accelerate the overall intelligent process of Chinese automobile companies.

As the global leader in the electric vehicle industry, Tesla ranks among the top in terms of sales, profitability, and technical capabilities. Will its FSD once it enters China form a "cost reduction blow" to domestic electric vehicle companies?

Regarding this point, if Tesla opens up the FSD function in China in the future, it will not only benefit the penetration rate of intelligent driving, but also create a "catfish" effect, stimulating domestic car companies to increase investment in autonomous driving and accelerating the iteration process of advanced autonomous driving technology in China.

Therefore, Tesla's promotion of FSD's entry into China is not necessarily a good thing, just like Tesla's entry into China that year saw significant progress in the domestic electric vehicle industry.

From the current situation, there has always been a competition between pure visual solutions and LiDAR solutions in the field of autonomous driving. Tesla and domestic BYD (002594. SZ), Ideal Automobile (LI. US), Xiaopeng Automobile (XPEV. US) have adopted different routes, as shown in the following figure.

From the development of Tesla FSD, relying on algorithm framework upgrades and large model applications, the reliability of pure visual routes can be improved. At the same time, combined with 4D millimeter wave radar applications, good perception effects can be formed.

For domestic electric vehicle companies, the pure vision solution and the LiDAR solution are not only a technical route dispute, but also a comprehensive choice related to efficiency, cost, and safety. They are also suitable ways for each car company to choose based on the current reality.

Researchers from Huaxi Securities believe that for domestic car companies, considering the lack of technical capabilities and data accumulation in the short term, the LiDAR route is still expected to be one of the more deterministic technical solutions.

At present, domestic car companies have also made some progress in intelligent driving. It is understood that from the end of 2020 to 2022, Wei Xiaoli and others have successively launched high-speed navigation assisted driving functions; In 2023, NOA (Navigation Assisted Driving) will move from high-speed to urban areas, and independent car companies represented by New Forces (Ideal, Xiaopeng, NIO, Huawei) will have urban assisted driving landing plans within the year.

Overall, in the field of autonomous driving, Tesla is in the first tier, with certain advantages in technology and data. However, this does not mean that domestic electric vehicle companies will be completely defeated. There are a large number of domestic electric vehicle companies, and they also have their own "unique jobs". The subsequent competition and progress in this area are worth noting.

What are the concept stocks in the autonomous driving industry chain?

From the perspective of the capital market, there are many concept stocks on the autonomous driving industry chain. Among them, in the field of complete vehicles, it owns concept stocks such as Ideal Automobile, Xiaopeng Automobile, BYD, Changan Automobile, Geely Automobile, etc; In the field of components, we have Desai Xiwei, Jingwei Hengrun W, Bertelli, Shangsheng Electronics, Baolong Technology, Junsheng Electronics, Hua'an Xinchuang, and so on.

However, it should be pointed out that although autonomous driving is a direction strongly supported by policies and the industry trend is also improving, it has not been fully implemented in China. Therefore, in subsequent investments, attention should still be paid to the increase in the penetration rate of autonomous driving and the actual implementation situation.