Tesla says that he can not make affordable self-driving cars without China – Quartz

If Tesla CEO Elon Musk will sell fully autonomous cars, it seems he will need China to help him do it.

Since July 2018, Tesla has asked the US government to exclude an electronic control unit for its models S, X and 3 from a tariff of 25% when importing the coin, according to the Government documents obtained by Reuters and TechCrunch. The authorities rejected the requests for models S and X and the request for model 3 is still pending.

The electronic control unit that Tesla is trying to exempt has been described as the "brain" of the car in the documents. Elon Musk said at a corporate event held last month that this 3.0 autopilot hardware would be the technology allowing autonomous driving on Tesla vehicles. Although Tesla designs all of these hardware components internally, it relies on other companies around the world to manufacture these large-scale parts for vehicle production.

But Tesla says that its development from production to production is only six months, no other country can provide fault-free parts in such a short time.

"Tesla has not been able to supply manufacturing for the Autopilot 3.0 calculator in the United States," reads a company document. "We brought in industry experts who could achieve this quality and complexity in addition to deadlines, which was not possible outside of China."

The site of Quanta Computer in Shanghai, where Tesla manufactures the parts, is not the only responsible for the technology, notes TechCrunch. One of the chips that accelerates the process of artificial intelligence on Autopilot 3.0 hardware is manufactured by Samsung Texas, for example.

These pieces are of crucial importance for the future that Musk plans for Tesla. He said last month that his cars would "appreciate the assets," which means they would become more valuable over time, thanks to improvements made to the updated autopilot software on the 3.0 autopilot hardware.

Update: This article has been updated to clarify that Tesla designs its own hardware, but relies on outside companies to manufacture parts for vehicle production.