https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/tesla-claimed-first-autonomous-car-delivery-8-months-ago-and-never-did-it-again/
Tesla autonomous delivery
Eight months ago, Tesla made headlines around the world when it claimed to have completed the “world’s first autonomous delivery of a car”, a Model Y that “drove itself” from Gigafactory Texas to a customer’s home about 30 minutes away. Tesla never did it again. Not once.
The June 27, 2025 marketing stunt was a masterclass in manufactured milestones. Tesla’s official account posted a video showing a Quicksilver Model Y navigating parking lots, highways, and city streets to reach its new owner’s home in the Austin area.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, claimed the vehicle reached 72 mph and that the company “literally chose a random customer who ordered a Model Y in the Austin area.” CEO Elon Musk celebrated it on X, noting it happened a day ahead of his own self-imposed deadline.
The media picked it up. The stock got a bump. And then — nothing.
If you claim to have solved autonomy, can autonomously deliver vehicles from your factory, and claim that it is more efficient, why wouldn’t you keep doing it?
As we reported in January, not a single additional customer has received their Tesla through an autonomous delivery. Every Model Y buyer in Austin, or anywhere in Texas, where regulations don’t prevent this, still picks up their car the old-fashioned way. The “autonomous delivery” was not the beginning of a new era in car logistics, it was a one-time demonstration for the cameras, timed for maximum stock impact.
This fits a pattern we’ve documented extensively. Tesla executes a flashy one-off, lets the media cycle and social media do the amplification work, and quietly moves on before anyone asks why it never happened again. The 2016 “Paint It Black” autonomy demo, which was later revealed to have been staged, was an early version of this strategy. The June 2025 autonomous delivery was its most refined execution yet.
The same pattern repeated in January 2026 when Musk announced “unsupervised” Robotaxi rides in Austin just before the Q4 earnings call. The stock jumped 4%. Then the unsupervised rides vanished within a week. When the “unsupervised” rides did briefly appear, Tesla had simply moved the safety monitors to trailing chase cars.
To this day, Tesla’s “unsupervised robotaxi rides” are limited to a small section of the Austin Robotaxi service area.
These stunts don’t work without amplification, and Tesla has cultivated a network of online influencers who reliably provide it. Omar Qazi, who runs the Whole Mars Catalog account (@WholeMarsBlog) on X, identified by the Wall Street Journal as the person whose tweets Musk most frequently responds to, is one of the most effective.
When Tesla posted its autonomous delivery video in June, Qazi quote-tweeted it with: “Waiting for Fred Lambert to explain to me how this is just ‘smoke and mirrors’.”
The “smoke and mirrors” referenced my article ahead of Tesla’s Robotaxi launch in Austin in June 2025, in which I argued that the program was all about optics rather than the true commercial launch of Tesla’s autonomous driving effort.
Well, Omar, here’s your explanation, eight months later: it was smoke and mirrors. Tesla did it once, declared victory, and never did it again. That is the definition of a demonstration, not a capability. If Tesla could autonomously deliver cars at scale, it would be doing it, the logistics savings alone would be worth millions. The fact that it chose not to tells you everything about where the technology actually stands.