(Yicai) April 30 -- Tesla and Baidu have received approval from Chinese regulators for their jointly developed advanced driver-assistance map, a person familiar with the matter told Yicai.

Among several Baidu digital map products recently approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources, one of them, with the review number GS (2023) 4634, was its advanced driver-assistance map project with Tesla, the person said, adding that their collaboration is exclusive and highly customized.

Bloomberg News reported yesterday that California-based Tesla will launch its Full Self Driving system in China using Baidu’s navigation and mapping services. The US automaker’s shares surged on that and other positive news, following an unexpected visit to China by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk the day before, where he met with Premier Li Qiang.

Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA] closed 15.3 percent higher at USD194.05 a share in New York yesterday, while Baidu [NASDAQ: BIDU] ended up 5.6 percent at USD106.17. Baidu’s Hong Kong-traded stock [HKG: 9888] rose 1.4 percent to HKD104.70 (USD13.39) today.

Earlier this month, Musk responded to a query on X about when the carmaker would launch its FSD system in China, saying “very soon.”

Behind Tesla's efforts to launch the system in the world’s biggest auto market is the growth bottleneck it has faced. Its first-quarter global sales tumbled 8.5 percent from a year ago to 386,810 vehicles, the first drop in four years. Sales in China fell 3.6 percent to 132,000.

On the day of Musk's surprise visit, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said that Tesla's China-made Model 3 and Model Y had cleared its data security review, making it the first foreign carmaker to pass the test and getting it a step closer to launching FSD in the country.

Seventy-six vehicle models from Tesla, BYD, Li Auto, Lotus Cars, Hozon New Energy Automobile, and Nio passed the test for the anonymization of external facial information, default non-collection of cockpit data, in-vehicle processing of cockpit data, and prominent notification for handling personal information.

Tesla built a data center at its Shanghai Gigafactory in 2021 for information storage within China to meet the country’s data security requirements.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev