EVWire brief: World's first autonomous delivery of a car! This Tesla drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to its new owner's home ~30min away — crossing parking lots, highways & the city to reach its new owner. It even went up to 72mph on the highway.
Here are both the full drive and the highlights video from the autonomous delivery trip:
And the full 30-minute ride is seen on this video.
Sawyer Merritt did a 20-minute interview with this first self-delivery client, Jose (starts at 2:20). Turns out Jose was not affiliated with Tesla in any way, and Tesla just offered this opportunity to him out of the blue. And the car ran the robotaxi software, which the team “removed” once the car arrived, installing the regular latest user software to the car.
And Jose also said on the interview that it seemed like this was a very emotional moment for the Tesla team that was on the spot, with some engineers even with tears in their eyes. No wonder — they have been working on this for 11 years now, it must be great to see it all come to fruition.
The Tesla team on the delivery
To be fair, most of that route was from Giga Texas → into the geofenced area where Tesla already uses its robotaxis in. So I would assume we will see Tesla gradually offer more of this full self-delivery option once the limitations are lifted for the service.
I find it likely that this particular Model Y now holds some extra value and might end up in a museum somewhere.
Now imagine if you leave a lease payment unpaid… will the Tesla drive itself back to the service center?
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