Tesla Owners in China Will Soon Pay for Parking Right From the Car Screen, Thanks to Alipay

Image: Tesla

Tesla owners in China will soon be able to pay for parking straight from their car’s touchscreen, after Tesla and Alipay signed an agreement to bring Alipay’s in-car assistant to Tesla vehicles in the country.

According to Yicai, the two companies formally signed an in-car assistant cooperation agreement on October 20. Tesla’s China infotainment system is set to add Alipay’s smart parking service in a later software update, letting owners pay parking fees quickly and securely on the car’s screen. The report adds that more features meant to make everyday tasks in the car more convenient are already in development.

The report doesn’t say when that update will arrive, which Tesla models will get it, or which parking lots and garages will accept payment through the car. We also haven’t seen a separate announcement from Tesla or Alipay yet, so details like pricing and how the payment flow works on screen are still unknown.

This isn’t the first time Tesla has plugged one of China’s everyday apps into its cars this year. In February, Tencent Cloud teamed up with Tesla to bring WeChat-linked features for the Model 3 and Model Y in China, letting drivers send a location shared in a WeChat chat directly to the car’s navigation and get service suggestions such as nearby restaurants and parking information based on their destination, as we reported in our story on Tesla’s new WeChat features in China. Those features were set to arrive through an over-the-air update and come standard on future cars built at Giga Shanghai.

Tesla has been tailoring its software for Chinese drivers for years. A China software update that rolled out in January 2023 added support for WeChat mini programs alongside Apple Music, Mango TV and a handwriting keyboard, according to the release notes we published for Tesla’s 2022.44.30.8 update in China. In June 2024, Baidu started providing lane-level navigation for Tesla vehicles in China, an upgrade from the road-level map data it had supplied since 2020, as we covered when Tesla’s Baidu Maps announcement went viral.

The Alipay deal follows the approach Chinese automakers such as BYD, NIO and Li Auto have taken for a long time, building local apps and services deeply into their cars, while Tesla has historically kept its software more closed. Putting Alipay’s parking payments next to WeChat brings Tesla’s China cars a step closer to the apps their owners already rely on every day.

If you drive a Tesla in China, would you pay for parking from the car’s screen, or stick with your phone?