In May, Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev and her entourage visited the Tesla Model Y manufacturing plant in Germany, where she met with senior executives from the global company’s management.
The details of the visit were kept secret by the ministry at the request of their hosts from Tesla. However, it can now be revealed that in a meeting with Tesla VP EMEA Joe Ward, it was agreed that he would come to Israel to examine the possibility of establishing a Tesla hub for smart transport for Israel and the Middle East.
Tesla is moving toward global leadership in autonomous driving, which the company’s chairman, Elon Musk, has identified as a strategic goal.
As part of this, the company is running advanced tests of its fully autonomous driving system, known as FSD (Full Self-Driving), in several locations in the United States and China, both as robot taxis and on public roads, using volunteer drivers in Teslas they own.
Tesla hasn't passed the regulatory hurdle
Despite this, Tesla has not yet succeeded anywhere in the world in surmounting the regulatory hurdle that would allow it to begin unlimited use of the technology for its millions of customers.
Although there are currently thousands of Tesla vehicles on Israeli roads, whose owners paid about NIS 36,000 for the smart system in their cars, in the hope that it will receive regulatory approval to operate it via a remote software update.
But it is doubtful whether this was the reason Tesla insisted on including the software in these models, since the commercial potential in Israel is negligible compared to the volume of the company’s sales worldwide.
It seems that the real importance of Israel for Tesla is its potential as a kind of ideal “testing ground” for the commercial operation of FSD systems in cars.