Tesla Motors Inc is seeking a Chinese production partner for its electric cars as co-founder Elon Musk predicts a bright future for autonomously driven vehicles.
China’s market has enormous potential given concerns about pollution and the environment, Musk said in Hong Kong yesterday. The billionaire has held “a number of high level meetings” with the government, he said without elaborating.
Tesla posted its strongest quarterly sales in China in the third quarter last year, as it prepares to begin sales of its Model X sport utility vehicle this year. Securing a local partner would help Tesla circumvent import tariffs of at least 25 percent, while abiding by regulations that set a ceiling on foreign ownership of automaking ventures at 50 percent.
While Musk cautioned that falling oil prices could dampen interest in electric-powered vehicles, worsening pollution could prove a boon to makers of cleaner vehicles that are exempt from restrictions such as license plate quotas in Beijing. Among his predictions for the future are a Tesla truck, a manned flight to the International Space Station by his SpaceX venture before the end of 2017 and a majority of new cars to be driverless within 15 years.
Driving a car is likely to be “like owning a horse. You do it for sentimental reasons, not transport,” Musk said.
Tesla is working with the Hong Kong government, which has the highest per capita number of Teslas, on rolling out home power-charging stations. That could provide a model for other cities to follow.
Tesla is one of several companies, including Alphabet Inc, Baidu Inc, General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co, working on autonomous or self-driving technology.
While Musk is looking to China, Chinese Internet billionaire Jia Yueting (賈躍亭) is aiming to break ground on a US$1 billion production plant in Nevada for his electric car company, Faraday Future, which unveiled a prototype 1,000-horsepower super car in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained