EVwire brief: A six-year-old Tesla Model 3 equipped with Hardware 3, its original battery pack and original drive units has successfully completed the first leg of an ambitious autonomous road trip spanning the length of North America.
The vehicle, which has accumulated about 180,000 miles (290,000 km), recently completed a roughly 5,000-mile (8,050 km) diagonal drive from Key West, Florida to Ruby Beach, Washington using Tesla's FSD Supervised V14 Lite, according to the team behind the Buoy to Bay project, @koby_pierce and @LiamsDadTravel on X.
The full Buoy to Bay route: Key West to Prudhoe Bay, 13,713 miles.
The milestone was achieved without manual steering, braking, or accelerator inputs.
“We just went 5,000 miles of those across the country on FSD. Again, we gave no steering inputs, no brake inputs, or accelerator pedal inputs. The car made all of the decisions on steering and how fast to go. So that is a remarkable achievement for Hardware 3.”
The completed route marks the first major milestone of the Buoy to Bay expedition, which aims to drive between some of North America's most extreme geographic points using Tesla's FSD Supervised system.
The first two legs of the long journey have been completed successfully.
Two legs remain:
Washington to Fairbanks, Alaska: roughly 2,197 miles through British Columbia and the Yukon, where Starlink takes over as cell coverage disappears.
Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay: 494 miles one-way on the Dalton Highway, a gravel supply road built for oil trucks, with only three charging stops and, per the team, stretches where FSD will likely hand off to a human driver.
According to the project's website, the team is documenting the trip to showcase both Tesla's Full Self-Driving capabilities and the long-term durability of an aging, high-mileage Model 3 that continues to operate with its factory-installed battery and motors.
Leg 3 and Leg 4 will likely require some manual intervention due to the challenging terrain.
Context:
The achievement follows another recent long-distance FSD milestone involving Tesla's latest hardware.
Earlier this year, a Tesla equipped with Hardware 4 successfully completed what was described as the first coast-to-coast drive across Canada using FSD Supervised, driving 3,760 miles from Vancouver to Halifax with zero interventions on FSD v14.3.3. That same driver had also completed a zero-intervention coast-to-coast run across the US two months earlier.
The ongoing Buoy to Bay expedition is different in one important respect. Instead of relying on Tesla's latest hardware, the project is being completed in a 2020 Model 3 equipped with Hardware 3, showing that the older platform continues to support long-distance FSD Supervised driving.
Source: BuoytoBay.com, Koby Pierce on X
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