This may be a bigger event than a robot taxi.
Tesla has announced that it has completed the first delivery of a fully autonomous car from the factory to a customer. The Tesla Model Y car left the company’s gigafactory in Austin, drove along the highway, through suburbs and residential areas before arriving at the customer’s apartment building.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had promised that the first fully autonomous delivery would take place on June 28. But on Friday, he announced that this event took place a day earlier.
“There were no people in the car at all, and there were no remote operators driving it at any time. Fully autonomous!” Musk wrote on X. “As far as we know, this is the first fully autonomous ride without people in the car or without remote control of the car on a public road.”
The last part is not accurate. Waymo has been operating fully self-driving vehicles with passengers on the highway for more than a year. The cars that drive on freeways in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are available only to the company’s employees, with the aim of opening them to the public later.
However, Tesla’s achievement is still notable, especially given the rapid deployment of the company’s Robotaxi service. The Robotaxi was launched with safety monitors in the passenger seat with access to an on/off switch, and within days, several safety violations were reported, including driving across a double yellow line into the oncoming lane and braking hard in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
By proving that it can operate fully autonomous cars on highways without the presence of a safety monitor, Tesla can demonstrate that its full self-driving system is getting closer to Musk’s promise of “unsupervised” driving. Robotaxis aren’t quite there yet, they still need safety monitors and remote supervisors. This leaves Tesla in a limbo between confidence that its technology can handle driving without human intervention and less confidence that there is a human in the cabin.
