According to foreign media reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the company has completed the delivery of its first driverless new car on June 27. A Model Y SUV departed from Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, and drove autonomously to the customer’s apartment building, achieving autonomous driving delivery without human intervention.
Tesla’s official account on Musk’s social platform X later shared a video showing the Model Y driving on public roads in Austin, including highways, with no one in the driver’s seat or passenger seat.
Image credit: Tesla
In the video, the Model Y drives autonomously on the highway, passes through residential streets and parking lots, and finally stops in front of an apartment building to hand over to customers. Customers waited on the side of the road, surrounded by several employees wearing Tesla-logo T-shirts. It is worth noting that the curb of this section is red and belongs to the fire escape where parking is prohibited.
Musk also posted on X: “The fully autonomous delivery of the first Tesla Model Y from the factory to the customer’s home has just been completed, spanning urban areas, including highways, one day earlier than originally planned!” Congratulations to the Tesla AI team, including the software and AI chip design departments! ”
Musk specifically pointed out: “There is no one in the car during the entire delivery process, and there is no remote control at any point in time.” This is true full self-driving! To our knowledge, this is the first time that completely unmanned (both in-vehicle and remote) autonomous driving has been achieved on a public highway. ”
However, Musk’s claim that “full self-driving will be the first on public highways” is not accurate. Google’s Waymo opened its fully autonomous ride-hailing service on the Phoenix Expressway to employees as early as 2024, and has now expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the company has already operated commercial self-driving taxi services in several U.S. cities.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said on X that the company “randomly selected a customer in the Austin area who ordered a Model Y” to participate in the delivery, and the delivered vehicle was “exactly the same as the Model Y produced at Tesla’s factory.”
He also mentioned that the Model Y delivered without a driver has a top speed of 72 miles per hour (about 116 kilometers), while the official website of the Texas Department of Transportation shows that most highways in the state have a speed limit of 70 mph.
Tesla did not specify which version of the software and hardware the vehicle in the video is equipped with, nor did it mention when the technology will be commercialized.
However, the Model Y owner’s manual on Tesla’s official website shows that when using the company’s current state-of-the-art “Full Self-Driving Supervised” system, the driver must keep his hands on the steering wheel and be ready to take over the vehicle’s steering or braking at any time.
