Autonomous car delivery?! Tesla has done what Hollywood screenwriters have dreamed of since Knight Rider: a shiny new Model Y rolled off the assembly line in Texas and drove itself to its owner's driveway - without a driver, without a remote control, without panicked hands on the steering wheel. It was the first autonomous car delivery. With this, Elon Musk's company made the first fully autonomous vehicle delivery in history and showed in the middle of a hot asphalt afternoon that the future sometimes comes a day earlier than the official schedule says.
We've been hearing about full autonomy at Tesla since 2017, when Musk first promised it would "in a year" driving a car by himself. Seven years, a few thousand tweets, and endless memes later, it finally happened in south Austin: Model Y drove about 24 km (15 mi) from Giga Texas to a suburban parking lot in half an hour, reaching 116 km/h (72 mph) on the highway. How the ride went.... so the first autonomous car delivery.
The route reads like a travel agency brochure: from the factory gates across the parking lot, on to I-35, past countless pickups and Whataburger, through the urban jungle of South Lamar Boulevard, and the grand finale – a robotic rear wheel arch in the new owner’s driveway. All maneuvers, lane changes, and turns were handled by cameras, radar, and an unnamed number of NVIDIA transistors – the human didn’t even wave.
FSD v12.5 and the iron nerves of silicon – the first autonomous car delivery
The heart of the whole show is the final version Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v12.5, which runs on Hardware 4. Unlike previous "beta shortcuts", this package no longer displays the "Hands on the wheel!" warning, but only politely checks whether the camera detects alert eyes in the driver's seat - even though no one was sitting there this time.
Tesla also opened a new one for the event Robot taxis a way that unites Smart Summon and door-to-door navigation. To be clear: the vehicle remained under the control of its own computer vision throughout the entire journey; no safety engineer was sitting in the accompanying Cybertruck with his finger on the red button for “Abort Mission.” It was the world’s first fully autonomous car delivery.
With the application, you will be able to call a car in front of the entrance of your apartment or shopping center.
Regulators, skeptics and competition
While Waymo While Tesla is still waiting for permission to carry paying passengers on interstate highways, and Aurora only drives freight trucks, Tesla has overtaken both – at least according to the marketing clock. But the battle is not over: analysts warn that it will have to Musk First, we need to convince federal and European regulators before a fleet of self-driving Teslas can actually roll out across the Old Continent. In Europe, we'll have to wait for the world's first autonomous car delivery.
Critics, of course, jumped out of their online dens and claimed it was “too staged” – as if that diminished the technical achievement. To be fair, even the first moon landing looked suspiciously well-lit, but no one is seriously questioning it (except those wearing aluminum foil caps).
Conclusion: the first autonomous car delivery
So what does this 30-minute robotic road trip for the average person? First, the keys to your future car might be waiting for you in your driveway – while you’re sipping coffee in your slippers. Second, the price tag? Tesla hasn’t officially revealed a specific “delivery” fee; the Model Y Long Range AWD currently costs around €55,000 in Europe, the Model Y starts at €44,000, but who knows how much the software option that turns the car into its own courier will cost. Currently, FSD costs $99 per month, but that could change. Third and most importantly: if the car comes to you, you won’t have to ask your brother-in-law to drive you to the dealership. This is where Tesla made its biggest revolutionary move.
For many, this is another Muscovite gimmick show, but the tech world knows that big moves always seem like a circus at first. Until one day they become a boring everyday practice – like power windows or Bluetooth. And when that day comes, we’ll be nostalgic commemorated in June 2025, when Tesla brought itself to the owner for the first time, and we thought: "Really, we used to go to the store to get a car. How strange!"
