On June 28th, Tesla announced that it completed the world's first driverless delivery of a new vehicle on June 27th.A Model Y SUV departed from the Austin, Texas Superfactory and drove for 30 minutes on Autopilot, passing through highways, residential streets, and parking lots, before finally stopping in front of a customer's apartment building to complete the handover.The video shows no occupants in the car, which reached a top speed of 115 kilometers per hour and even made a temporary stop at a red fire lane.
Tesla CEO Musk took to social media platform X to emphasize that the delivery was "completely unmanned with no remote control in the car" and said it was "the first time a public highway has been completely driverless."But the claim is controversial: Google's Waymo, which opened its fully autonomous driving service on the Phoenix freeway to employees as early as 2024, has already completed more than 4 million paid trips in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, and plans to expand to Tokyo by 2025.
Technical details show that the delivered vehicle is equipped with Tesla's latest HW5.0 hardware platform, with four 4D millimeter wave radars, 12 high-definition cameras and Dojo supercomputing chip, with an arithmetic power of 1.1EFLOPS, a 5-fold increase compared with its predecessor, and the software version of FSD V12. It's worth noting that, despite the upgraded hardware, Tesla's official website user manual still explicitly requires drivers to use the current "Full Autopilot (Supervised Driving)" service, which is a fully automated driving service.The user manual on Tesla's website clearly requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel and take over at all times when using the current "Full Autopilot (Supervised)".
Ashok Elluswamy, head of AI at Tesla, revealed that the delivery was randomly selected from regular customers in Austin, and that the vehicle was identical to the production version, and was completed a week after the Robotaxi pilot was launched, emphasizing the consistency of the technology.However, the video shows the vehicle traveling 72 mph (about 116 km/h) on a Texas highway with a 70 mph speed limit, which is suspected of being slightly over the speed limit.
Industry analysts say the delivery marks a key step in Tesla's commercialization of Autopilot, but the maturity of its technology remains in doubt, and that Waymo, with its 700-vehicle fleet and four years of operational experience, has an advantage in handling complex urban road conditions.Although Tesla Robotaxi pilot has been launched, only 10-20 modified Model Y will be put into operation in the first batch, so the commercialization process still needs to be seen.
Tesla has yet to announce a mass production timetable and regulatory certification progress for the technology.The incident both showcases its breakthrough in the field of autonomous driving and exposes the discrepancy between technological proclamations and actual compliance.As companies such as Waymo and Cruise accelerate their layout, the competition on the autonomous driving track will further heat up.