Overnight Tesla announced they have completed the first ever, autonomous home delivery. The event is a demonstration of what’s possible with Tesla’s hardware software combination.
A Model Y left the production line at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, Texas and drove itself to the customer’s home. Many, myself included, expected that Tesla would limit the risk involved in executing this and find a new customer deliver close to the factory, however we have now learned the Model Y leveraged highway driving, suggesting the journey was a little longer.
While Tesla has promised to release a full video of the autonomous journey soon, some details have already emerged. Ashok Elluswamy, the head of Autopilot at Tesla, confirmed the Model Y reached speeds of up to 72mph which translates to 115.87 km/h.
It’s impressive the technology acheived this feat at any speed, but particularly impactful given the car was able to deliver itself to a customer while travelling at a speed that would see you being fined for speed here in Australia, where the limit is typically 110 km/h.
Update: We now have confirmation of the first customer to have their vehicle autonomously delivered. Jose confirmed in the replies, he is not a Tesla employees.
This achievement goes a step beyond the recently launched Robotaxi service, which has a safety monitor present in the passenger seat.
Musk confirmed there were no humans in the vehicle. It’s really difficult for some to come terms with, but Tesla has acheived Full Self Driving. While the company faced much criticism for naming it’s ADAS solution FSD, those paying attention understood the name represented the end game, fully autonomous driving which has arrived in 2025.
Technically this is incredibly impressive, however it’s not clear how much this would scale. Typically a new vehicle owner will expect to see a very low number on the odometer, usually in the range of 10, maybe 15kms due largely to transport.
Here’s where things get interesting.. if a customer was willing to accept 50, or 100kms on the odometer, and could recognise $0 in delivery charges, would that be an option people would accept? Clearly Tesla’s costs for transport and logistics go way down for locations that could autonomously deliver themselves. There’s no need for a truck, diesel, driver etc, but then it’s worth thinking about the surface area that’s possible with this.
I expect this only makes sense for deliveries in cities where Tesla has Gigafactories, Austin, Freemont, Berlin and Shanghai. Deliveries to those cities would be significant, but as a percentage of overall delivieres, a relatively low percentage.
Where this is the most useful to Tesla, is for the future Cybercab product. As Tesla produces robotaxis, they will need to send them to hubs that clean and charge the vehicles. Tesla won’t care about the odemeter reading of a robotaxi, so even if that automous trip from the factory was hundreds of miles or km from the Gigafactory, an autonomous delivery could work just fine.
On June 11th, Elon Musk posted they would launch Robotaxi Tentatively on June 22nd, which as we know occured last week, but also suggested that by June 28th, they’d achieve this factory to customer home delivery. With today being June 27th, they acheived this a day early.
The reality is, there is no close second on this world first event. Other autonomous vehicle services like Waymo don’t make their own cars, so this is not possible, we’d have to look further abroad to something like an Xpeng, Xiaomi or other Chinese automakers, but it’s unclear they even have an appetitie to achieve this.
Guiness World Records.. leave your phone on.
For more information, head to https://www.tesla.com/
