Tesla sends driverless model Y from the factory to customers to promote Robotaxi Tech

Just a few days after starting Limited Robotaxi Services in Austin, TexasTesla has removed additional stunts to showcase the progression of autonomous driving auto software. The company has allowed a Model Y SUV Drives about 15 miles From Tesla’s factories to apartments where the new owner of the car lives, CEO Elon Musk has completed what he called the first “autonomous delivery” of his customer’s cars.

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. Those numbers are It’s expected to be tough for Teslawhich of Sales fell in 2024 – Before Musk takes it Chainsaw to the public image of the company By engaging in the Trump administration. 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) Speed-up version (It lasts about 3.5 minutes), the car fuses inside and outside the highway, turning right at the red, navigate a small roundabout and turn left, unprotected.

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). A mix of 45 miles of Las Vegas roads and side streets in January.

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.

Tesla was famously released and promoted, so that’s a related question Video of one car that appears to pass through the Bay Area (Employees act as driver safety operators) In 2016, it was misleading at best and at worst essentially staged.

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. Tesla engineer Ashok Elswamy said in 2022 Deposition “The intention of the video wasn’t to accurately portray what customers could use in 2016, it was to portray what they could incorporate into the system.”

So did Musk He is closely involved in creating that video.

Tesla vehicles are used Leader And other external sensors in the South Austin area where limited Robotaxis 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.

Furthermore, this customer delivery drive lives in the shadow of the much bigger promise that Musk once made (as he repeated for years after that) about how Tesla’s self-driving software can ride a car From Los Angeles to New York City without intervention.

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 comes from the man who had an organization. Throw a child-sized dummy Just a few weeks ago, I went in front of my Model Y SUV.