Tesla Vehicles Drive Themselves Unsupervised From Factory To Semi Truck Loading

Tesla has tweeted out that its vehicles are now driving themselves — using Full Self Driving (Unsupervised) — from the factory where they are produced in California to the loading dock lanes where they will get put onto semi trucks and taken away. You can watch videos of that here:

Teslas now drive themselves from their birthplace at the factory to their designated loading dock lanes without human intervention

One step closer to large-scale unsupervised FSD pic.twitter.com/Aj6dHsLaRO

— Tesla AI (@Tesla_AI) January 29, 2025

Starting with the ~1.2 mile route at the Fremont factory pic.twitter.com/avgSpBxb4j

— Tesla AI (@Tesla_AI) January 29, 2025

Is this a step forward? For sure! Is this a much more efficient and cost-saving way to get cars from the factory to the Tesla Semi trucks? Definitely! Is this progress? Duh.

However, it also seems evident that these cars are driving on private property — just on Tesla’s own roads. So, no approval was needed from the state and it’s quite a controlled environment. You can also see in the videos that it’s a pretty clear track and the cars don’t drive at high speeds.

If I’m being honest, I’m surprised Tesla didn’t start doing this years ago. With Full Self Driving technology I had in my 2019 Tesla Model 3 when I bought it, I’m quite certain Tesla could have painted the lines from factory to loading area and quite easily programmed the cars to do this. In fact, I did think years ago that Tesla was about to start doing this.

So, yes, it’s progress — and it’s super cool to see in video — but it doesn’t blow my mind and don’t think it should blow anyone else’s. The positive side of it is probably that this is presumably using normal Tesla FSD software, so it shows how good FSD is getting to a certain extent, but, again, I think the tech could have done this fine a long time ago and I do wonder what has taken so long to implement it and cut costs.

What are your thoughts?