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Andrew J. Hawkins is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
This might be a bigger deal than the robotaxis.
Tesla said it completed its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery from factory to customer. A video posted on X shows the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y — leaving the company’s Austin Gigafactory, driving on the highway, passing through suburban sprawl and residential neighborhoods, before arriving at a customer’s apartment building.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had promised the first fully autonomous delivery would take place June 28th. But on Friday he announced that the milestone had been achieved a day early.
“There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous!” Musk wrote on X. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.”
That last part isn’t accurate. Waymo has been operating fully driverless vehicles with passengers on the highway for over a year. The vehicles, which are driving on freeways in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are only available to employees of the company, with the goal to open them up to the public at a later date.
But Tesla’s achievement is still notable, especially when you consider the rocky rollout of the company’s robotaxi service. The robotaxis launched with safety monitors in the passenger seat with access to a kill switch, and within a few days the vehicles were recorded committing several safety lapses, including driving over the double-yellow line into the opposite lane of traffic and hard braking in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
By proving it can operate fully autonomous vehicles on highways without a safety monitor present in the vehicle, Tesla is able to demonstrate that its Full Self-Driving system is getting closer to Musk’s promise of “unsupervised” driving. The robotaxis aren’t quite there yet, still requiring safety monitors and remote supervisors. That leaves Tesla in limbo between confidence that its technology can handle the driving without anyone in the vehicle, but less confident when there’s a human being riding inside.
