Elon Musk struck a deal with China’s Baidu, paving the way for the semi-autonomous driving technology to be rolled out in the World’s largest car market. Musk met China’s Premier Li Qiang, in Beijing recently. The US electric carmaker has recently grappled with falling sales and data security concerns.

Tesla has cleared an important regulatory hurdle with the Baidu deal foreign companies selling smart vehicles in China are required to use on of about 20 approved local supplier of mapping and navigation systems. In the first quarter Tesla had about 7.5 per cent of the EV sector in china, Tesla’s second biggest market.

Musk is pushing to roll out and monetise Tesla’s full self-driving system in China as the carmaker wrestles with declining sales amid rising competition. Tesla’ self-driving system can accelerate, steer and brake but it is not strictly a fully autonomous technology. Rolling out the technology in China would dramatically increase its subscription revenues, as well as help to differentiate its cars from local makers.

Tesla was forced to cut thousands of jobs as it lost ground to China’s local rivals amid a global slowdown in EV sales growth. Access to high0 definition mapping is crucial even to partially self-driving  technology system. Autonomous systems rely for navigation on a combination of sensors that can see obstacles and on maps of the road network.

Tesla’s EVs were included on a list of more than 70 car models that have been tested for data security compliance by a Chinese industry group.