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

Just a few days after launching a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, Tesla pulled off an additional stunt meant to show off the progress of its self-driving car software. The company let a Model Y SUV drive roughly 15 miles from Tesla’s factory to the apartment complex where the car’s new owner lives, completing what CEO Elon Musk called the first “autonomous delivery” of a customer car.

The vehicle was supposedly equipped with the same software Tesla’s robotaxi Model Ys are using in Austin, but upon delivery was downgraded to the commercially-available Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software that requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to take over at any moment. No one was on board and Musk claimed no remote assistance was given to the car.

The stunt came at an auspicious time for Tesla, which is set to release second-quarter delivery figures this week and financial results for the period later this month. Those numbers are expected to be grim for Tesla, which saw sales fall in 2024 — before Musk took a chainsaw to the company’s public image by getting involved with the Trump administration. Sure enough, Tesla’s stock price shot up late Friday after Musk first posted about the drive (although it has since fallen after a rough day of trading Monday).

I used to live in the city and have driven through this area of South Austin a lot; the path the Model Y took was complex, even on a bright, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. In the 30-minute video of the trip (Tesla also posted a sped-up version that lasts around 3.5 minutes), the car merges on and off of a highway, turns right on red, navigates a small roundabout, and makes an unprotected left turn.

These were challenging scenarios for autonomous vehicles that were in development just a few years ago, so it’s striking to see a car navigate them all in one go in real day-to-day traffic. 

Tesla’s not the only one that can tackle this mix of highways and surface streets. Waymo vehicles have been driving on highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco (so far, only for employees), and even Zoox gave us a driverless ride across a mix of 45-mile-per-hour roads and side streets in Las Vegas in January. 

While Tesla’s video of the drive is straightforward, it inspires a list of questions. One of the biggest is about what kinds of preparations Tesla made before letting this car through the factory door. 

It’s a relevant question because Tesla famously released and promoted a video of one of its cars supposedly driving itself through the Bay Area (with an employee acting as a safety operator in the driver’s seat) in 2016 that was, at best, misleading and, at worst, essentially staged.

At the time, Tesla made that drive seem effortless. But the company had pre-mapped the route and attempted it multiple times before the drive shown in the video, with the car requiring that the safety operator take control. Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy said in a 2022 deposition that the “intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system.” 

Musk was also intimately involved in the making of that video.

Tesla vehicles have been spotted using lidar and other external sensors in the area of South Austin where the limited robotaxi trial is taking place — were those vehicles used to prep this particular drive? We’ve asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to media requests. 

Also, can Tesla’s software safely run this route dozens of times without intervention (in-car or remote)? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Doing this once is an accomplishment, but it’s the ability to repeat this kind of drive and do it safely that is the ultimate test of whether the technology is reliable.

What’s more, this customer delivery drive lives in the shadow of a much bigger promise Musk once made (also in 2016, although he repeated it in years since) about how Tesla’s self-driving software would be able to take a car from Los Angeles to New York City without any interventions.  

As is the case with the early robotaxi test, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how well things are going, and how any of this is supposed to scale. 

One thing that seems notable, though, is that worst criticism Dan O’Dowd, one of the most outspoken critics of Tesla’s FSD software, could raise in an email to TechCrunch about the delivery drive was that the car ultimately came to a stop in a fire lane outside the new customer’s apartment. A fair criticism, but a minor one coming from a guy whose organization was hurling child-sized dummies in front of Model Y SUVs just a few short weeks ago.