Image: Tesla
A Tesla has finally done what Elon Musk promised nearly a decade ago: drive itself from Los Angeles to New York without a single human input along the way.
Over the weekend, Alex Roy — a longtime automotive journalist and autonomy tester — completed what he’s calling the first fully autonomous, zero-intervention “Tesla FSD Cannonball Run.” The journey spanned 3,081 miles from Los Angeles to New York City, with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software handling 100% of the driving, including highways, city streets, and winter weather, without any human intervention.
Roy shared the milestone on X, noting the drive took 58 hours and 22 minutes nonstop, aside from charging stops, using FSD version 14.2.2.3 on a 2024 Tesla Model S equipped with AI4 hardware. The team traveled through extreme cold, snow, ice, slush, and rain, averaging 64 mph. Remarkably, Roy said the car could have reached New York even faster had humans not been onboard, adding unnecessary detours and delays.
The trip was hands-off from start to finish — including charging sessions — with the only recorded “disengagement” occurring when Roy accidentally touched the steering wheel himself. The entire journey was documented on camera, with video footage expected to be released soon.
This achievement builds on a growing body of real-world evidence showing how far Tesla’s Full Self-Driving has come. Just last month, Tesla enthusiast David Moss completed a 10,000-mile coast-to-coast drive on FSD without intervention, after previously logging 5,000 consecutive miles under FSD control. Even a 1,200-mile Cybertruck FSD run last November now looks modest by comparison.
What makes this Cannonball run particularly notable is the timing. It comes just as Tesla started offering fully autonomous Robotaxi rides in Austin with no driver or safety monitor onboard, marking the first public deployment of “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving. Together, these milestones suggest Tesla is rapidly closing the gap between supervised autonomy and true hands-off driving at scale.
Roy himself is no Tesla cheerleader, which makes the result all the more compelling. As Musk previously put it, once autonomy is mature, most human input becomes an error. If the upcoming footage from Roy’s trip lives up to the hype, this could go down as a defining moment for Tesla’s self-driving ambitions.
