Last week, Tesla hit a new milestone in its self-driving car ambitions by inviting users to experience its driverless ride-hailing cars on public roads in Austin, Texas.
Now, the company has taken things up a notch by delivering a Tesla from its factory in Austin, Texas, to a customer’s house, without anyone in the car.
On its X page, Tesla posted: “World’s first autonomous delivery of a car!”.
The car drove itself along highways and suburban streets to reach its new owner’s home ,which was located about 30 minutes away.
Along with this update, the company shared a video of the drive of the Quicksilver Model Y. The journey started at the factory ramp before the car merged onto a highway and off again.
From there, it took suburban roads, navigating traffic, pedestrians, traffic lights and roundabouts before pulling up at the customer’s house, who upon its arrival took delivery of their new car.
This is a big achievement for Tesla and the company then followed by sharing a few photos of the delivery outside the customer’s home on their X page.
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, also shared the news and congratulated the Tesla AI team: “Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI teams, both software & AI chip design!”
Details of the trip were also shared by Tesla’s vice president of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, on X, particularly the max speed reached in the delivery trip.
According to Elluswamy, the Model Y achieved 72 miles per hour or almost 116 km per hour on the highway.
The historic moment for Tesla AI comes only months after the company shared that Tesla vehicles were driving themselves from the factory to their designated parking spots in the outbound section of the factory.
A video of Tesla Model Y and Cybertruck operating with FSD software at Tesla’s Texas factory was shared by Tesla’s AI team.
With that testing under its belt, the company undertook the self-driving delivery exercise, highlighting the car’s capabilities on public roads without any driver or passengers.
Overall, this is a significant milestone in Tesla’s roadmap to roll out fully autonomous vehicles using its self-developed FSD software.
This Tesla Model Y delivery shows the world that the company’s focus on AI and self-driving cars is starting to come together, with more use cases likely to be demonstrated in the coming weeks and months.
In the meantime, all eyes are on the state of Texas ,where Tesla’s Robotaxi service continues to operate with invitations for test rides going out to broader users, ahead of likely expansion into the wider Austin area soon.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.