Since the last century, the process of purchasing a car has remained largely unchanged: cars are transported from factories to dealerships by trucks, trains, or ships, and ultimately reach their owners. However, the process that has been going on for so long might shortly be changed. Tesla is aiming for a future in which a newly manufactured vehicle can drive directly to the owner’s home.
This would be one of the most radical changes in automotive logistics since the start of mass production. Customers could monitor their car on the road in real time, travelling on highways, traffic, and city streets, totally without any human intervention.
From Factory Floor to Front Door
The theory is not complicated, but it is technologically complicated. A Tesla would come off the production line, plug in to the Tesla network, and start a completely autonomous trip to the destination. The vehicle would do all the highway merges and even the city navigation without any human intervention using cameras, neural networks, and high-precision mapping.
The present vision is based upon Full Self-Driving (FSD) software developed by Tesla, which the company still trains on millions of real-world miles of data. The autonomous execution of every delivery would not only transport a car but also create useful driving information to enhance the system for future cars.
Theoretically, the customer gets a message that his vehicle has left the factory, the car intends to take an optimal path, it makes itself charged between the stations at Supercharger, and then it is delivered to the address of the customer, ready to unlock with the help of the Tesla app.
No dealership visits. No delivery trucks. Nothing but a car that drives itself home.
Transforming Automotive Logistics
Self-delivery would save a lot of money on transportation. Nowadays, it takes trucks, fuel costs, human services, and sophisticated planning to transport moving vehicles out of factories into the delivery centers. It would cost less to get rid of much of that infrastructure and lower emissions.
It would also accelerate delivery schedules. Rather than keeping them waiting to get a transport slot, cars could be shipped the moment they are manufactured and passed. To customers, that will translate to quicker handovers and a more customized experience.
There are also larger implications. Self-driving delivery would restructure the supply chain, cut down on traffic by car carriers, and liberate human labor to more valuable activities. It can even affect the design of the factories of the future, with the production locations designed such that they allow direct autonomous departures.
Other automakers and tech companies will feel the heat and are likely to pressure them to speed up their autonomous vehicle schedules due to this development. Although numerous companies, such as Waymo and Cruise, have introduced limited pilots of ride-hailing services, the factory-to-customer delivery system developed by Tesla indicates new precedents in the use of autonomy in logistics.
The outcome of this roll-out may open up the prospects of autonomous ride-sharing, long-haul trucking, and an entirely new automotive economic system, one in which not only do the cars drive themselves, but may even deliver themselves.
