After a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode suddenly swerved off of a busy highway and almost straight into a ditch, the owner of the vehicle praised the driving technology to high heaven for supposedly saving his skin.
“Tesla FSD saved my life last night on Interstate 95 in South Carolina,” wrote the driver, who goes by the display name “The Electric Israeli.”
“Car in front braked hard suddenly. FSD veered to the left and got back safely on the road,” he explained. “Thank you @Tesla_AI.”
The user, who also calls himself “Dr. Moshe,” helpfully uploaded footage of the incident, and it paints FSD’s supposedly heroic intervention in a far more dubious light.
During a night commute, the video shows the Tesla tailing an SUV in front of it at a reasonable enough distance. But when the SUV brakes and slows down, neither FSD nor Moshe take notice. There’s ample time to react, but instead of gradually slowing down to respond to the SUV in front, the Tesla’s self-driving software brakes at the last second and veers off the road, nearly plunging into the depressed center of the grass median.
The dramatic intervention affords us a view of the road ahead: miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, meaning that both driver and driving software had no excuse not to be ready for another stop.
Seemingly intended to exculpate FSD, Moshe wrote in a follow-up tweet: “We noticed at the same time.”
Why FSD swerved off the road is anyone’s guess. Hindsight is 20/20, and backseat driving is seldom F1-worthy, but it sure looks like that the Tesla wasn’t in danger of rear-ending the SUV, even though it braked late. The maneuver, we’d hazard, was totally pointless. And had the median been something other than a fairly level stretch of grass, it could’ve ended up a lot worse.
Such is the blind devotion of the Tesla fan. When one man’s Cybertruck running FSD wrapped itself around a pole last year, its owner also praised the automaker. “Thank you @Tesla for engineering the best passive safety in the world,” they wrote after the accident.
A Model Y owner was similarly thankful — or in the owner’s words, “insanely grateful” — after FSD obliterated a deer at full speed while making no attempt to slow down, footage showed, even after acknowledging that Tesla’s service was terrible.
“FSD works awesome!” the owner enthused.
A reminder that Full Self-Driving isn’t actually fully self-driving, and is not classified as autonomous driving software, but rather as a driving assistance feature. Of course, like many Elon Musk products, it commands cultish loyalty even as it’s being investigated by a federal regulator over frequent reports of it driving straight into the path of oncoming trains at railroad crossings. Life-saving tech indeed.
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