Musk Amplifies FSD Video of Old Man Who Won't Watch the Road
Elon Musk has again promoted the misuse of Tesla's "Full Self-Driving," quote-tweeting a clip of a 98-year-old owner who openly admits he has stopped watching the road at intersections.
The video, which Musk boosted with a heart emoji, has reportedly passed 9 million views and lands as Tesla defends a growing stack of FSD and Autopilot crash lawsuits.
The clip originated with The Fast Lane, which featured Larry, a 98-year-old from Farmington, New Mexico, who bought a new Model Y and now uses FSD (Supervised) to drive him around town. Sawyer Merritt clipped it for X, and Musk amplified it from there. Larry is a lifelong car enthusiast whose first car was a 1931 Ford Model A and who has owned more than 100 vehicles. What matters legally is how he describes his use of the system.
"I don't want to look at every intersection and see, 'Is this intersection clear, and is that one clear? Is there anybody behind me?' I don't want any of that, and I don't have any of it," Larry says in the video. Watching the car clear an intersection on its own, he adds: "Look, I didn't have to look, you know! I don't want to look, it's just doing it." Asked whether he trusts it fully, he answers: "I trust it 100%."
That behavior runs directly against Tesla's own disclaimer, which states that "currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." The system requires the driver to watch the road and stay ready to take over at all times, including at intersections — the exact place Larry says he has stopped looking. FSD does make mistakes, and in this same video the car misses the Purple Cow restaurant sign on a turn.
Tesla's entire legal defense in these cases rests on the driver being responsible for supervision. A Florida jury already found Tesla partly liable in a fatal Autopilot crash, returning a $243 million judgment, and the company reportedly faces up to $14.5 billion in lawsuits across roughly two dozen cases. Every plaintiff's attorney in that stack now has a clip of Musk personally endorsing a driver who says he does not look.
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