Just a few days after launching limited Robotaxi services in Austin, Texas, Tesla has drawn out additional stunts to show off the progress of autonomous auto software. The company has driven the Model Y SUV into an apartment about 15 miles from the Tesla factory, where it lives in the apartment where the new owner of the car lives, completing what CEO Elon Musk called the first “autonomous delivery” of its customer vehicle.
The vehicle is probably using the same software Tesla Robotaxi model in Austin, but after its release it was downgraded to commercially available, fully automated driving (supervised) software that drivers must take over at any time. No one was on board and Musk claimed that no remote assistance was given to the vehicle.
Stunts have come at an auspicious time for Tesla. Tesla is expected to release second quarter delivery figures and financial results later this month this week. These numbers are expected to be tough for Tesla, which saw its sales fall in 2024. Sure enough, Tesla’s stock price surged late Friday after Musk first posted about the drive (but fell after a rough day of Monday’s trading).
I used to live in the city and have driven a lot of this part of South Austin. The path the model took was complicated, even on a bright, sunny afternoon day. In a 30-minute video of the trip (Tesla also posted a speed-up version that lasts about 3.5 minutes), the car merges on and off the highway, turning right at Red, navigating a small roundabout and turning unsecured left.
These were challenging scenarios for self-driving cars that were only under development a few years ago, so it’s impressive to see cars navigate them all at once in real life daily traffic.
Tesla is not the only one who can tackle this highway and surface street mix. Waymo vehicles are driving on highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco (so far, employees only). Even Zoox gave us a driverless ride in January, mixing 45 miles of Las Vegas roads and side streets.
Tesla drive videos are simple, but inspiring a list of questions. One of the biggest is how Tesla prepared the car before passing it through the factory door.
A related question is as Tesla famously released and promoted a video of one of the cars believed to be driving the Bay Area (where employees act as safety operators in the driver’s seat) in 2016.
At the time, Tesla made the drive look easy. However, the company pre-mapped the route and attempted multiple times before the drive was visible in the video. The car was required to be controlled by a safety operator. “The intention of the video was not to accurately portray what customers could use in 2016, but to portray what could be incorporated into the system,” Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy said in a 2022 deposit.
Musk was also heavily involved in creating the video.
Tesla vehicles were discovered using Lidar and other external sensors in the South Austin area where limited robotic acid testing is being conducted. Were these vehicles used to prepare for this particular drive? We asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to media requests.
Also, can Tesla’s software run safely dozens of times without intervening this route (inside the car or remote)? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Doing this once is a fruit, but it is the ability to do this kind of drive repeatedly and safely, and is the ultimate test of whether the technology is reliable.
Additionally, the customer-delivered drive lives in the shadow of the much larger promise that Musk once made about how Tesla’s self-driving software can drive cars from Los Angeles to New York City without intervention (as I’ve repeated it for years in 2016).
As with the early Robotaxi tests, we still don’t know much about how well things are going and how this scales.
But one thing that seems to be notable is that one of Tesla’s FSD software’s most outspoken critics, Dan Odoud, can email TechCrunch about the delivery drive. It’s a fair criticism, but a small criticism from an organization throwing a child-sized dummy in front of a Model Y SUV just a few weeks ago.
