Just a few days after the launch of a limited robot service in Austin, Texas, Tesla brought out an extra trick intended to highlight the progress of self-guiding car software. The company left a model y SUV Drive about 15 miles From the Tesla plant to the apartment complex where the new owner of the car lives, completing what Elon Musk CEO called the first “autonomous delivery” of a customer.
The vehicle is supposed to have been equipped with the same Tesla Robotaxi Model YS software uses in Austin, but it was degraded to the commercially available full self-guiding software that requires drivers to pay attention and be ready to take over at any time. No one was on the boat and Musk claimed that no remote help was given to the car.
The trick came in a prominent time for Tesla, which is to release the second quarter delivery data this week and financial results for the period later this month. These numbers are expected to be gloomy for Teslawhich saw sales fall in 2024 – before Musk took a chainsaw in the company’s public image involving it in Trump’s management. Certainly, the price of Tesla shares went up late Friday after the first time Musk published for the car (though it has fallen since then after a difficult day of negotiation on Monday).
We lived in the city and I drove to this area of South Austin a lot. The path that took the Y model was complicated, even on a bright, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon. In the 30 minute video of the trip (Tesla was also posted A SPED-UP version This takes about 3.5 minutes), the car merges from and extinguishes from a highway, turns right in the red, navigates at a small circular junction and makes an unprotected left turn.
These were provocative scenarios for autonomous vehicles that were ongoing just a few years ago, so it is impressive to see a car navigating them in a real daily traffic.
Tesla is not the only one who can deal with this mixture of motorways and surface roads. Waymo vehicles drive on highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco (so far, only for employees), and even Zoox has given us a ride without a mixture of 45 miles per hour and side streets in Las Vegas in January.
While the Tesla video of the drive is simple, inspires a list of questions. One of the biggest is for what kind of preparations Tesla made before leaving this car through the factory door.
Is a relevant question because Tesla was released and promoted well and promoted A video of one of his cars is supposed to drive himself through the vaginal area (with an employee acting as a driver’s seat operator in 2016 was, at best, misleading and, at worst, it was essentially organized.
At that time, Tesla made this move seem effortless. But the company had pre-wrote the route and tried it many times before the unit in the video, with the car demanding the security operator to take control. Engineer Tesla Ashok Elluswamy told a 2022 deposit that “the intention of the video was not to accurately visualize what was available for customers in 2016. It was to visualize what could be built on the system”.
Musk was also that is closely involved in construction of this video.
Tesla vehicles have been detected using lap And other exterior sensors in the South Austin area where the limited Robota Test – Was those vehicles used to prepare this particular disk? We asked Tesla, but the company no longer responds to the media’s requests.
Also, can Tesla software safely run this route dozens of times without intervention (in-car or remote)? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Doing this is once an achievement, but it is the ability to repeat this type of movement and safely make it the final test for whether technology is reliable.
In addition, this customer delivery move lives in the shadow of a much greater Musk promise that once took from Los Angeles to New York without any intervention.
As with the Early Robotaxi test, there is still a lot that we don’t know how well things are going and how one should escalate.
One thing that seems remarkable, however, is that the worst criticism of Dan O’Dowd, one of the most sincere critics of Tesla’s FSD software, could be concentrated in an email on TechCrunch about the delivery disc was that the car finally stopped in a fire outside the new customer. A fair criticism, but a young man who comes from a man whose organization was Hurling Dummies Size Children In front of the SUV model Y just a few weeks ago.
