Image: Tesla
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.
The French government has ordered the local arm of Tesla to “cease its deceptive commercial…
BYD's next sleek new electric sports car spied, testing in black with a possible soft…
"Powered by renewable energy“ may mean any of at least four distinct things, and we need…
Tesla's supercharger network reaches 70,000 reliable ultra-fast charging stations as Australian growth continues.
StarCharge launches its flagship Halo V2G bidirectional DC charger in the Australian market after what…
Last week on The Driven Podcast, Sam Parkinson, Tim Eden, and Ed Lynch-Bell dive into…
View Comments
Where are the haters? All I hear is crickets ... 🦗🪳🪳🪳🕷️🪰🪲
Nope, just that most people have abandoned this site after they screwed up the commenting system and dumped many years worth of conversations and debate and excellent, helpful info posted by many knowledgeable commenters. I'm only here because I'm having a cuppa...
How many years back does anyone need to go?
Still 7 years worth of stories and comments available at the click of a button.
Was it remotely controlled? Was there a remote supervisor watching what was happening the entire journey, ready to intervene if something went wrong?
Tesla is silent on these two points. Omitting pertinent and relevant information can be construed as misleading and deceptive, if that’s what happened here.
My Tesla still phantom brakes on the highway… 🙄
Was there filming of this breakthrough event from dozens of sources all quickly collected and stitched together to give the impression of being from just one enthusiast ?. Are we getting towards the end of a quarter of ?.
This article was posted today. Your imaginary haters haven't had time to read it yet.
I don't see why this sort of thing couldn't become commonplace, albeit in a (geo)limited range. There are driverless taxis in LA and San Fran that have been operating for years, although not with cars that are for sale to the public. Let's hope Tesla can nail the self-driving thing using cameras alone and no radar/lidar, but it's a challenge!
Nice simple, straight roads, nothing complex, nothing many other driver assist systems couldn't handle, which was why it was chosen. Give it inclement weather or more complex road conditions and see what happens.
Besides, there's no way to know how autonomous this was, I would almost guarantee that there was a remote operator driving or at least acting as a safety monitor for this car. It's not like fElon hasn't lied about this sort of thing before, special K lies about all sorts of things...
If this was self driving, then it's only a matter of time before one of these kills someone, or a whole family. It would be great if this were a real, repeatable capability, but all the evidence so far is to the contrary.
To quote Musk:
To be a total pedant, he said "no remote operators in control at any point". That doesn't explicitly state that there wasn't a remote operator observing the journey who was ready to take over if required, just that it didn't happen on this trip.
I'd like to believe Elon that the car was left totally on its own, but it would make total sense if they had a remote operator ready to intervene if it was required. That way, if no intervention was required you can legitimately make the claim that he has, which is great marketing. If a remote intervention was required, they could have tried again until it worked without having to tell anyone so they could truthfully make the claim they have. Time will tell, they're certainly closer than they ever have been so here's hoping they get there sooner rather than later.
It would be nice to know that the local authorities were informed and approved of this experiment on the public. I assume Elon Musk showed that appropriate level of respect for 'authority' 🤔.
Nah, gotta “move fast and break things”. Seeking permission is just asking to have the dead hand of government regulation and nanny-statism being a handbrake on brilliant innovation that said government can’t possibly understand.
/s
Hahahahaha
The thing about pessimism, is that it always sounds smart. Like the pessimist knows something you don't and you're the gullible fool being taken for a ride.
"If this was self driving, then it’s only a matter of time before one of these kills someone, or a whole family."
Why? There's no guarantee this will ever happen. Also, people are killed on the roads everyday, if autonomous cars kill people at a lower rate than humans then it's still a genuine improvement. I don't think autonomous cars need to be perfect before they should be implemented, do you?
"It would be great if this were a real, repeatable capability, but all the evidence so far is to the contrary."
What evidence are you referring to? Tesla has released the full video of this journey that confirms no-one was in the car and implied no-one was remotely monitoring it (as per above they haven't explicitly stated this wasn't the case). They have now done hundreds of robotaxi rides in Austin. There have been a few documented mistakes and at least one safety monitor intervention I've seen, but overall it's been very good so far and will only get better as they continue to work on it.
So is Tesla actually going to take on liability issues?
I have heard one lawyer suing over accidents and deaths from Tesla FSD remarking the Telsa shouts out how great FSD is and then whispers a liability disclaimer that you are responsible for any accident that FSD triggers, even though it might cut out 1 second before the crash.
I am not saying that self-driving is bad but with the lack of warning or time to react when it cuts out is dangerous. Without training on how to monitor and react then will the improved reaction times of self driving will probably be negated.
And then we get to the Tesla vison only self driving. That has been heavily criticised. It has been pointed out that most pedestrian accidents with cars happen in low light conditions. A vision only system is not as good as a system with more sensors. Probably Tesla's biggest competitor Xpeng has ditched lidar for 'vision lead' self driving. It has still has kept radar and ultra sonic sensors.