Elon Musk said on Tuesday that Tesla vehicles will start driving autonomously from the factory to the customer’s houses “this year,” the company’s chief wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
The news comes two months after Tesla announced that its vehicles started driving to their loading dock lanes on their own — without any human involved.
“Teslas now drive themselves from their birthplace at the factory to their designated loading dock lanes without human intervention,” the company wrote on X last January.
The company is also preparing to start offering its unsupervised full self-driving rides in Austin as soon as June.
“It only gets better from here. Tesla is still on track to launch autonomous ride hailing in Austin in June and roll out to many cities in America by the end of this year,” Musk said in February.
On Tuesday, Tesla wrote on X: “One day it’ll drive itself right to your house.” Elon Musk commented on the post saying that it will happen “this year.”
In late 2024, BMW Group revealed that its “new vehicles drive automatically and driverless over one kilometer” at the factory, marking the company’s “experience for future autonomous driving.”
Earlier this week, Tesla‘s CEO stated on X that “for the first time, there will soon be a generalized, pure AI solution to full self-driving,” relying solely on the company’s software.
“Just cameras and the Tesla AI chip with Tesla AI software,” Musk added, which implies the company is moving away from remote sensors like LiDAR that many brands use on their autonomous driving systems.
HW3 Upgrade
Back in 2016, Musk promised that Tesla’s Hardware 3 (HW3) computers would be enough to support full self-driving, claiming that all vehicles built from that point on would come with “all necessary hardware for full self-driving capability.”
At the Q4 2024 earnings call, Musk acknowledged that HW3 is not powerful enough for full autonomy saying Tesla will need to upgrade the hardware.
“I think the honest answer is that we’re going to have to upgrade people’s Hardware 3 computer for those that have bought full self-driving,” he said during the company’s most recent earnings call, adding that it’s “going to be painful and difficult but we’ll get it done.”
As of the time of writing, Tesla is trading at $248.89 on the pre-market session this Wednesday, having previously closed 0.7% higher at $254.11. The stock soared 63.5% in the last twelve months.
Earlier this month, local outlet Hefei Daily reported that Chinese EV maker Nio is already using autonomous tech at its F2 plant, allowing cars to drive themselves off the assembly line.
