Tesla Driver Makes First-Ever Full Self Driving Trip From LA To New York

Tesla is heading into the self-driving future at a faster pace than ever. As the robotaxi finally hits the roads, Full Self-Driving (FSD) takes over the discontinued Autopilot, and Elon Musk promises "sentient" autonomous driving. Tesla owners are also finding that the tech is reaching new levels of maturity. The latest exhibit comes courtesy of a team of independent experts, who gave complete autonomy to a 2024 Tesla Model S, and the car covered over three thousand miles without any human engagement.

Alex Roy, a General Partner at NIVC, alongside AI expert Warren Ahner and self-driving enthusiast Paul Pham, has achieved a milestone by recording the first Tesla FSD "Cannonball Run," driving from Los Angeles to New York without the human driver ever taking over. The team covered the stretch between midtown Manhattan in New York City to Redondo Beach in Los Angeles, riding as passengers in a Tesla with zero human intervention across the driving journey. 

Roy and his co-passengers put the Tesla car to the test, running the FSD v14.2.2.3 build and the HW4 computer sensing suite. Cruising at an average speed of 64 mph, the team completed the journey in 58 hours and 22 minutes, and ten of those hours were devoted to charging. To recall, the FSD 14 series software is shaping up to be one of the biggest updates in Tesla's history in terms of new features and autonomous driving capabilities. Enhanced safety and improved navigation are touted to be the two key upgrades.

The 3,081 miles was a fully hands-off experience, including the top-up stops. According to the outlet, where Roy is a contributor, "every inch" of the entire journey was handled by the autonomous driving system. There was only a single instance of disengagement, and that too resulted from human error. Roy, who led the experiment, says he accidentally touched the steering wheel. Through the remarkable drive, the group also had to deal with snow and the performance hit that comes with freezing temperatures for an EV. Believe it or not, this is not the first achievement of its kind.

In December, another Tesla owner named David Moss let FSD on a Model 3 cover over ten thousand miles without any intervention events. Moss wrote on X that it was the world's first fully autonomous coast-to-coast drive. More impressively, just two months before Moss' feat, a couple performed a coast-to-coast drive in a Toyota Prius using a third-party device called Comma 3x that enables autonomous driving on over 300 car models.

The recent string of long-distance autonomous driving reports come at a crucial team. Tesla has promised big things to for the upcoming FSD 14.3 update, it's autonomous cab has finally started hitting the roads, and competitors like Waymo are looking at international expansions. There's still plenty of skepticism regarding the road-readiness of autonomous stack such as Tesla's FSD, and there are investigations from the Justice Department, but successful public tests like Roy's can boost adoption.