Just a few days after launching Limited Robotaxi -Service in Austin, TexasTesla took out another Stunton intended for the progress of her self-driving car software. The company left model y suv Drive about 15 miles From the Tesla factory to the apartment complex, where the new owner of the car lives, completing what CEO Elon Musk called the first “autonomous delivery” of a customer car.
The vehicle was allegedly equipped with the same software that Robotaxi Model Ys uses in Austin, but after delivery was re-evaluated to the commercially available full self-driving (controlled) software, which requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to take over at some point. No one was on board and Musk claimed that no remote help was given to the car.
The Stunt came in auspicious time for Tesla, which aims to release a second-quarter delivery digit this week and financial results for the period after this month. Those numbers are expected to be sad for Teslawho Saw sales fall in 2024 – before Musk took chain to the company’s public image engaging with the Trump administration. Enough, Tesla’s share price fired late on Friday after Musk first posted about the drive (although it has since dropped after a rough day of business on Monday).
I used to live in the city and traveled a lot through this area of southern Austin; The path that the model y took was complex, even on a bright, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. In the 30-minute video of the trip (Tesla also posted SDD-UP VERSION This takes about 3.5 minutes), the car merges on and off road, turns to the right on a red, sails a small round, and makes an unprotected left turn.
These were difficult scenes for autonomous vehicles that developed just a few years ago, so it is striking to see a car navigate them all at once in real daily traffic.
Tesla is not the only one who can treat this mix of roads and surface streets. Waymo vehicles were driving on roads in Los -English, Phoenix and San Francisco (so far, only for employees), and even Zoox has given us a driver. A 45-mile-for-hour road mixture and side streets in Las Vegas in January.
While Tesla’s video about the drive is simple, it inspires a list of questions. One of the biggest is about what preparations Tesla did before leaving this car through the factory door.
It’s an important question because Tesla famously released and promoted Video from one of its cars is supposed to drive through the bay area (with an employee acting as a security operator in the driver’s headquarters) In 2016, that was, as best, misguided and, in the worst, basically staged.
At the time, Tesla made that drive seem helpless. But the company pre-mapped the route and tried it many times before the drive displayed in the video, with the car requiring the security operator to take control. Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy said in 2022 Deposit that the “intent of the video was not accurately portraying what was available to customers in 2016. It was portrayed what was possible to build the system.”
Musk was also intimately involved in the creation of that video.
Tesla vehicles were spotted using lidar And other exterior sensors in the area of South Austin, where the limited robotaxi attempt – were those vehicles used to prepare this particular drive? We asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to the media.
Also, Tesla’s software can safely function this route dozens of times without intervention (in-car or remote)? A hundred times? Thousands? Doing this once is a realization, but it is the ability to repeat this kind of driving and make it safe, which is the final test of whether the technology is reliable.
What’s more, this customer delivery lives in the shadow of a much larger promise Musk ever made (also in 2016, though he repeated it in years) about how Tesla’s self-driving software will be able to take a car From Los -English to New York without interventions.
As is the case with the early robotaxi test, there is still much we don’t know about how well things work, and how anything this is supposed to be scaled.
One thing that seems remarkable is that worst criticism Dan O’Dowd, one of the most invented critics of Tesla’s FSD software, could raise an email to Techcrunch about the delivery drive was that the car finally stopped in a fire alley outside the new customer apartment. Fair criticism, but a minor coming from a guy whose organization was Hurling Children’s Education Before the Y SUVS model a few short weeks ago.
