Giga Berlin is using Full Self-Driving software to move newly built cars, and a recent update posted on X confirmed these Model Ys have now traveled a combined 93,000 miles without anyone in the driver’s seat. The cars travel from the end of the assembly line straight to the outbound parking lot, which gives the company a massive amount of internal testing data.
Video story
750,000 cars built at Giga Berlin.
— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) May 11, 2026
Here’s what it takes. pic.twitter.com/HEK8vkS0VR
Factory testing replaces human drivers
The process starts right after final quality checks in the Light Tunnel, when the car activates the software and drives out of the building. It then travels through the active factory grounds and heads toward the staging area. Along the way, the vehicle must steer around moving forklifts, walking employees, and other cars. It makes a brief stop at an on-site Supercharger where a worker plugs it in, and later finishes the trip by parking itself in the delivery lot.
This setup saves money and speeds up the entire shipping process, freeing up workers who no longer have to drive thousands of cars across the campus every week. This direct approach cuts down on traffic jams inside the gates and serves as an instant quality test. If a car can successfully complete this busy route, the company knows the cameras and computers are working properly right out of the gate.
Building on past operations
Tesla tested this idea at its other facilities first, and the Fremont and Texas factories previously logged over 50,000 autonomous miles doing the exact same thing with the unsupervised system. Those trips often cover more than a mile per run and sometimes include small sections of public roads. Now the Berlin plant is adding to that total fast, and every qualifying Model Y joins the effort the moment it finishes production.
European regulators have not yet approved this software for public streets, so the automaker avoids this hurdle by keeping the cars strictly inside the factory gates. This controlled environment lets them test the system safely without dealing with local government restrictions. The company can still gather highly useful data on European weather patterns and road markings, and that information feeds right back into the main software network.
These short trips add up quickly and feed into a much larger data pool. Owners driving on regular streets have already driven more than nine billion miles using the supervised version of the software. This massive amount of real-world video helps train the computers for a future robotaxi network.
The main goal is door-to-door delivery without a human, and Tesla recently ran an experiment in Texas where a new car drove itself from the factory directly to a customer’s house in Austin. That test handled highways and city traffic with no human input, giving a preview of future operations. The Berlin factory just keeps running cars to the parking lot, and that steady stream of short trips gives the engineering team exactly what they need.
We’ve launched an official Tesla Owners Online Forum. Join early and claim your "Founding Fuel" badge.
