Photo taken on Oct. 26, 2020 shows the Tesla China-made Model 3 vehicles at its gigafactory in Shanghai, east China. Photo: Xinhua

 Traffic police in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, said on Saturday that it does not target certain vehicle brands, rebutting rumors saying Tesla cars were regularly intercepted by police on highways.

"We take normal temporary control measures for traffic flows according to the work needs of road traffic management, not for specific vehicle types," the Guangzhou traffic police said on its official account of Weibo, the Chinese twitter-like platform. 

The response came after a video was posted on Friday by an auto blogger on Weibo showing several Tesla cars were intercepted on a highway with a police car staying nearby.

Soon after the official announcement by Guangzhou traffic police, the auto blogger, with 660,000 fans, posted part of a paper note, like an internal memo from within the traffic authority, saying per the requirement of a superior guard, when the fleet comes near or arrives at the inspection site, the on-duty personnel of the brigade in all jurisdictions must conduct control measures on Tesla vehicles, and it is strictly forbidden for the vehicles to approach or enter the guard route. 

The fleet aforementioned is likely referring to the visit of certain high-level officials in the city, according to some netizens.

The US auto brand has been under siege following the just wrapped-up Shanghai International Automotive Show, during which two women, both Model 3 owners, protested at the Tesla booth, with one woman stepping onto a model Tesla vehicle on site, and shouting "Tesla brakes fail."

Then Tesla China caused an uproar for their allegedly cocky attitude toward Chinese consumers' concerns, following a spate of defective issues problems in the country, which have affected consumers' confidence in the product.

The latest progress of the dispute between the automaker and protesters around quality problems and driving data sharing came on Thursday when Tesla provided data to the woman, who shouted on top of the vehicle, at the request of the market watchdog.

Handling driving data has become a rising concern for enterprises and regulators following the issues faced by Tesla.

Wang Yao, the director of Technology Department of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, told the Global Times on Saturday that the association is considering releasing an automotive big data interactive blockchain platform in the near future, which is currently in trial operation.

Auto firms can upload the fingerprint of the data to the blockchain platform, and the data will be processed by a one-way encryption algorithm, which cannot be tampered with after being uploaded. If they encounter data credibility problems, they can call up the data package at the time and compare it with the fingerprint uploaded to the platform to draw a true conclusion, Wang noted.

Global Times