No, really. A Tesla Model S just drove itself 3,081 miles from Los Angeles to New York City with zero accidents and zero human intervention for the first time. Was it just another stunt, or a watershed moment for self-driving tech?

Today we're taking you inside the Tesla FSD Cannonball Run, as its organizer and wheelman Alex Roy named it after the famous cross-country speed record challenge. Joel is joined by Alex and The Drive editor Byron Hurd, who broke the news of the run in an exclusive story late last month, to dive into the planning, the challenges, the surprises, and the significance of a car actually driving itself across the US. In the middle of a brutal winter, no less.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology has been a flash point since it launched in limited public beta tests in 2020. Its capabilities on surface streets and highways have since reached incredible heights through successive software updates—but it's also been plagued by unpredictable errors, dangerous glitches, its involvement in multiple fatal crashes, and an ongoing federal probe. Adding to the controversy is Tesla's reliance on cheaper cameras to help the car "see" instead of the lidar-based systems used by other major automakers. Also, despite the name it still requires the driver to look at the road ahead and be ready to take over.

But as Alex and his co-pilots Warren Ahner and Paul Pham showed, for all its faults Tesla FSD is still the most advanced semi-autonomous driving technology on the market today. And while it's taking longer than predicted, the leap from here to an actual self-driving car might be smaller than we think.

00:00 Intro

04:20 Alex Roy has a plan

10:50 How it came together

24:19 Winter is coming

37:15 What it really means for drivers

52:31 Outro

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