Jim Mullen, Chief Administrative and Legal Officer of Tucson Future, revealed that as early as 2020, the U.S. government has been paying attention to Tucson Future. At that time, Tucson had a driverless fleet of more than 50 trucks and served 18 customers including UPS and McLane.
However, Tucson’s future business focus in China and the United States will be different: in the United States, Tucson will focus on unmanned trunk lines in the future, while in China, Tucson’s future business focus will be port unmanned driving. However, under the big stick of national data security, Tucson will still find it difficult to escape the fate of US government supervision and investigation in the future.
Jim Mullen once said that CFIUS hopes that the technology developed by the American team will remain in the country, and does not want to see Tucson apply it to its Chinese business in the future. But in fact, the future US headquarters of Tucson did not share the source code or algorithm of autonomous driving technology with the Chinese team.
However, TuSimple will reach an agreement with CFIUS in the future, or even sell its Chinese business, which declares that the U.S. government has absolute control over the technology research and development of companies operating in the United States, and even foreign investment.
As data security becomes more and more important, many countries and organizations around the world have promulgated laws on data security.
- In 2021, the Chinese government promulgated the “Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of my country”, which mainly includes the review of data related to national security, the violation of national security by overseas data, and the overseas transmission of related data. and expressly enacted this law for safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests;
- In June 2021, US President Biden signed the “Executive Order on Protecting Americans’ Sensitive Data from Foreign Hostile Forces”, requiring the United States to take precautionary measures to prevent foreign countries from obtaining American data;
- In 2016, the European Union issued the General Data Protection Regulation to strengthen and standardize user data privacy in EU countries and regions.
Strict data protection in many countries and regions may mean that self-driving has been tested on roads in many countries, and the method of improving self-driving technology is coming to an end. In the future, if self-driving technology suppliers try to enter the single market, they must develop local-only self-driving systems under the local legal license, which will greatly increase the research and development costs of self-driving technology suppliers and car companies.
Earlier, there was news that Volkswagen was planning to acquire Huawei’s autonomous driving unit. An employee of Cariad, a software division of Volkswagen, once explained the reason to the German media “German Manager”: “We need a system different from that of the United States and Europe, otherwise, the risk of the group being caught in a trade dispute between China and the U.S. government is too great – China may not allow vehicles to enter its market.”
This shows that at a time when geopolitics is becoming more tense and data security is becoming more and more important, Chinese autonomous driving companies operating in China and the United States need to decide as soon as possible how to process the technologies and data they have developed in different countries. schedule. At the same time, the data acquired by autonomous driving companies in different countries in the future may no longer be used in the same system.
Perhaps under the continuous influence of multinational Internet companies and geopolitics, countries around the world will introduce relevant laws to protect the flow of their own data and technologies in the future.
For the global development of the company, autonomous driving companies may conduct localized research and development of autonomous driving systems according to the laws of different countries and regions, which may lead toThe autonomous driving system that should be used in any environment and region is divided into islands, and cars with only one autonomous driving system cannot drive normally between different countries.
In the face of possible technological isolation and differentiation in the future, autonomous driving companies with a sea of stars may now need to re-examine their dreams.
