Tesla sends driverless Model Y from factory to customer to promote its robotaxi tech

Only a few days after launching a Robotaxi service limited to Austin, TexasTesla has achieved an additional blow to show the progress of its autonomous car software. The company left a model SUV Y drive about 15 miles From the Tesla factory to the apartments complex where the new owner of the car lives, finishing what CEO Elon Musk called the first “autonomous delivery” of a customer car.

The vehicle was supposed to be equipped with the same software as the Robotaxi Ys model from Tesla used in Austin, but on delivery, has been demoted to complete autonomous software (supervised) which requires drivers to be careful and be ready to take over at any time. No one was on board and Musk said no distance assistance had been given to the car.

The blow arrived at a favorable time for Tesla, which should publish delivery figures in the second quarter this week and financial results for the period later this month. These figures are should be dark for Teslawhich Sales saw the drop in 2024 – Before Musk took a chainsaw in the public image of the company By getting involved with the Trump administration. Indeed, Tesla’s stock price increased Friday after Musk published for the first time on the reader (although it has since fallen after a difficult period on Monday).

I lived in the city and I had crossed this South Austin region a lot; The path that the model followed there was complex, even on a bright and sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. In the 30 -minute video of the trip (Tesla also published an accelerated version This lasts about 3.5 minutes), the car merges on a highway, turns right on the red, sail in a small roundabout and makes an unprotected left turn.

These are difficult scenarios for autonomous vehicles that were in development just a few years ago, so it is striking to see a car navigating them in one time in a real daily traffic.

Tesla is not the only one who can tackle this mixture of highways and surface streets. Waymo vehicles have led to the highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco (so far, only for employees), and even Zoox has given us a driverless journey through A mixture of 45 miles per hour and side streets in Las Vegas in January.

Although Tesla’s reader’s video is simple, it inspires a list of questions. One of the largest concerns the types of preparations that Tesla made before leaving this car through the factory door.

This is a relevant question because Tesla has released and promoted A video of one of his cars driving supposedly in the bay region (with an employee acting as a security operator in the driver’s headquarters) in 2016, it was, at best, deceptive and, at worst, essentially staged.

At the time, Tesla made this campaign appear effortlessly. But the company had pre-mapped the route and tried it several times before the reader’s broadcast in the video, the car requiring that the security operator takes control. Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy said in 2022 deposition That “the intention of the video was not to precisely portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to represent what was possible to integrate into the system”.

Musk was also Intimately involved in the manufacture of this video.

Tesla vehicles were identified using lidar And other external sensors in the South Austin region where the limited Robotaxi test takes place – have these vehicles used this particular reader? We asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to media requests.

In addition, can Tesla software safely execute this route of tens of times without intervention (by car or remotely)? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Doing this once is an accomplishment, but it is the ability to repeat this type of reader and do it safely is the ultimate test of knowing if the technology is reliable.

In addition, this customer delivery reader lives in the shade of a much larger promise musk (also in 2016, although he has repeated it for years) on the way Tesla’s autonomous software could take a car From Los Angeles to New York without any intervention.

As is the case with the first Robotaxi test, there are still a lot of things that we do not know about how things are going on and how all this is supposed to evolve.

One thing that seems notable, however, is that the worst critic Dan O’Dowd, one of the most frank criticisms of the Tesla FSD software, could raise an email at Techcrunch on the delivery disc was that the car finally stopped on a fireplace outside the apartment of the new customer. A good criticism, but a minor from a guy whose organization was launching mannequins the size of a child In front of the SUVs of the model just a few weeks ago.