SHANGHAI – Tesla Inc.
TSLA 0.26%
it would never provide the US government with data collected by its vehicles in China or elsewhere, said Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, at a high-level conference in China.
Musk’s assurance that Chinese customer data is fully protected followed the Chinese government’s decision to restrict the use of Tesla cars by military personnel or employees of major state-owned companies, as the Journal first reported on Friday. Beijing acted with concern that confidential data, such as images taken by car cameras, could be sent to the United States, according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaking via video link on Saturday to the government-backed China Development Forum in Beijing, Musk said that no American or Chinese company would risk collecting confidential or private data and then sharing it with its local government.
“Whether in China or the United States, the negative effects if a commercial company were to engage in espionage – the negative effects for that company would be extremely bad,” said Musk. If Tesla used its cars to spy on any country, he said, it would be closed everywhere, what he called “a very strong incentive to be very confidential”.
Concerns about commercial espionage have become exaggerated, said Musk, citing the case of the TikTok video platform – owned by Chinese technology company Bytedance Ltd. – which faced a ban in the U.S. last year before being lifted.
“Even if there was espionage, what would the other country learn and would it really matter? If it doesn’t matter, there is no point in thinking about it too much, ”said Musk. US concerns about Chinese espionage via TikTok are irrational, he argued: the platform’s videos mainly show people “just doing silly dances”
Tesla is seen as a model foreign company in China. It gained strong support from the Shanghai authorities to settle in the city and, in 2018, became the first foreign automaker in China to obtain approval for a factory it owned – that is, without a local joint venture partner. Chinese state-owned banks financed the project.
China has also become a central market for Tesla, accounting for about a quarter of its global sales of about 500,000 vehicles last year.
While continuing to expand the Shanghai plant and increasing local production of the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y compact crossover vehicle, Tesla had its first serious confrontation with Chinese officials last month. The State Administration of Market Regulation, the country’s main market regulator, publicly reprimanded the company for quality issues.
Tesla responded with a statement saying that it “sincerely accepted the guidance of government departments” and would make improvements by having “thought deeply about [its] deficiencies. ‘
—Bingyan Wang in Beijing contributed to this article.
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