Elon Musk recently addressed concerns about Tesla’s use of its cameras in its vehicles following a ban by the Chinese military.
Last week we reported on the People’s Liberation Army, China’s army, which issued a notice banning Tesla owners from parking their vehicles at bases and in housing complexes.
The concern seems to be related to Tesla’s use of cameras across its vehicles, which could be a safety issue depending on how the carmaker collects data from there.
In a recent conversation with Chinese quantum physicist Xue Qikun, Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed the issue and surprisingly said that Tesla is careful with the data:
There is a very strong incentive for us to be very confidential with any information. If Tesla used cars to spy on China or anywhere else, we’ll be shut down.
As we reported last week, the situation is reminiscent of the US ban on products from China’s Huawei.
The CEO called for more cooperation between the US and China without specifically talking about Tesla:
Even if there was espionage, what would the other country learn and would it actually matter?
As for Tesla, the carmaker mainly uses data from its camera to improve its driver assistance functions, which aims to eventually lead to a complete self-driving system.
Tesla gives owners the option to share video data as part of the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving program.
The automaker needs to collect as many videos from each market to feed its neural networks and train its self-driving system for each specific market, all of which have different road signs, markings, and so on.
Therefore, for this reason, Tesla in China does not have the same driver assistance functions available under its autopilot and complete self-driving packages.
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