There’s an aura of failure lingering around Elon Musk and the Tesla brand right now. A stink of mediocrity. Maybe even the funk of impotence.
For instance, as Electrek reminds us, in 2016, Elon Musk made a promise. He promised that, by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive itself from coast to coast. We’re talking Los Angeles to New York, with no human intervention.
That was bulls**t. Listen to any tech CEO nowadays and you will hear nothing but an endless stream of wild proclamations about how so-and-so massive shift will occur within the next 10 years! Five years! One year! Next week!
None of them ever come true, because they’re not making that proclamation for you, the consumer, but to trick the shareholder into thinking that the Elons of the world are anything more than glorified marketers, new age carnival barkers.
Tesla Bros Attempted a Coast-to-Coast Trip in Self-Driving Mode. They Crashed Right Away.
Case in point: it’s 2025 now, verging on 2026. The coast-to-coast drive still hasn’t happened. But two Tesla-loving influencers decided to see how far they could get with a modern-day Tesla. They plan to livestream a Tesla Model Y driving itself from San Francisco to Jacksonville using Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software, version 13.9.
They didn’t even make it out of California.
About 60 miles in, the self-driving Tesla hit a metal girder lying in the road. It was a very visible piece of debris that the car’s cameras completely ignored. The driver, who goes by “Bearded Tesla Guy” on YouTube, only intervened at the last second, after the vehicle had already become briefly airborne. The suspension was wrecked, and the sway bar bracket was broken.
Despite the name, Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is neither fully self-driving nor autonomous. It’s a Level 2 driver-assist system, which means it requires constant human supervision. Tesla has quietly renamed it “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” a phrase so absurd it reads like a parody of itself.
Tesla’s cars have been involved in hundreds of accidents, some of which have been fatal. This one wasn’t fatal, but it was perhaps the most appropriate: a pair of diehard Tesla fans putting the fantasy of truly autonomous driving to the test that failed 60 miles into a cross-country journey.
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