On the final day of 2025, the autonomous driving industry crossed a long-anticipated threshold. David Moss, a Tesla owner and early FSD adopter, completed the world’s first fully autonomous, zero-intervention drive across the United States—traveling from the West Coast to the East Coast without a single manual correction.
The 2,700-mile journey effectively fulfills a promise Elon Musk made nearly a decade ago and marks a decisive moment for end-to-end neural-network driving systems operating at national scale.
🚗 The Journey at a Glance #
The drive was conducted in a 2025 Tesla Model 3 (Premium Long Range RWD) equipped with AI4 hardware and running Full Self-Driving v14.2.
- Starting Point: Tesla Diner, Los Angeles, California
- Destination: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
- Distance Covered: 2,732.4 miles (~4,400 km)
- Total Time: 2 days, 20 hours
- Human Interventions: Zero
- Supercharger Stops: ~30, all handled autonomously (including lot navigation and parking)
The route traversed 24 states, covering deserts, mountains, winter weather, rural highways, and dense urban interchanges—conditions that historically expose the weaknesses of autonomous systems.
🧠 What Changed in FSD v14.2? #
The success of the coast-to-coast run is closely tied to the FSD v14.2.x release deployed in December 2025. This update represents a structural shift rather than an incremental improvement.
Key Technical Advances #
-
High-Resolution Vision Encoder
The perception stack now processes finer visual detail, improving recognition of subtle cues such as hand signals from traffic officers and small roadway debris. -
True End-to-End Navigation
Route planning, decision-making, and control are fully embedded within a single neural system, enabling real-time reasoning through construction zones, detours, and blocked roads without HD maps. -
Final-Meter Precision
New arrival controls allow users to specify exact stopping points—driveways, curbs, or parking structures—closing a long-standing gap required for Robotaxi-level operation. -
Verified Autonomy Metrics
Tesla’s new self-driving statistics panel confirms that David Moss has now exceeded 10,000 consecutive miles of autonomous driving without intervention.
🆚 Tesla vs. Waymo: Architectural Divergence #
The milestone reignited comparisons between Tesla’s vision-only end-to-end approach and Waymo’s sensor-heavy, map-dependent architecture.
| Aspect | Tesla FSD | Waymo |
|---|---|---|
| Sensors | Cameras only | LiDAR, radar, cameras |
| Map Dependency | None | High-definition maps |
| Operational Scope | Anywhere a human can drive | Geofenced cities |
| Failure Mode | Visual reasoning continues offline | Vulnerable to map/network loss |
Recent incidents during power outages have highlighted this divergence: while some map-dependent systems stalled due to synchronization failures, Tesla vehicles continued navigating intersections using visual context alone.
🧪 The Physical Turing Test #
A vehicle crossing an entire continent—through snow, rain, construction zones, night driving, and complex urban traffic—without human input represents what many now describe as a “Physical Turing Test” for AI.
This achievement moves autonomous driving beyond supervised assistance and into the realm of generalized autonomous agents operating in open environments.
🏁 Conclusion #
Tesla’s zero-intervention coast-to-coast drive is not just a technical demo—it is a proof point that nation-scale autonomy is now achievable using consumer hardware and software-defined intelligence.
With a verified 10,000-mile intervention-free streak, Full Self-Driving has crossed a threshold the industry has chased for years. The Robotaxi era is no longer theoretical—it has begun.