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In October 2016, Elon Musk said that by the end of 2017, a Tesla would drive completely by itself from Los Angeles to New York City. That didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen the next year, or the next year, or the next year, etc., etc. However, nearly a decade later, it did finally happen. Sort of.
A Tesla owner recently reported that he drove completely from the West Coast to the East Coast using Full Self Driving (FSD) the whole way — never taking over. From LA to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, David Moss reports that his Model 3 drove the full 2,732.4 miles in two days and 20 hours without a single intervention. He was also recently the first non-Tesla employee to pass 10,000 straight FSD miles without an intervention, with that coast-to-coast trip being part of those 10,000 miles.
It’s an impressive feat. I am certain I wouldn’t have had the patience or preference at some points to not intervene. But the fact that the technology can accomplish such a task is quite amazing. Where will the technology go from here? What is in store for 2026? We will see.
As Mike Barnard has pointed out, we can’t rely on too small of numbers to make any conclusions about Tesla FSD safety versus a human driver, especially when so many of the miles currently logged have been supervised, interventions have normally taken place much more frequently than in the above story, and there have seemingly been several crashes of trial Tesla robotaxis in Austin. However, there is no doubt FSD has gotten much better in recent years, and the milestone from David Moss is a notable milestone that finally, sort of, closes the door on Elon Musk’s claim from 2016. (I just say sort of since Tesla didn’t perform the drive itself, as Musk said they would, and it wasn’t actually to NYC, where it’s a bit more challenging to drive. Nonetheless, I’m counting it.)
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