Elon Musk is once again promoting the misuse of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), this time by amplifying a video of a 98-year-old man who openly admits he has stopped watching the road.
The clip is charming. It’s also a textbook example of the exact driver behavior Tesla’s lawyers are fighting in a growing pile of crash lawsuits.
A 98-year-old who ‘doesn’t want to look’
The Fast Lane (TFL) published a video featuring 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, a Tesla stock pumper moonlighting as a news aggregator on X, clipped it, and Musk quote-tweeted the clip with a heart emoji, pushing it past 9 million views.
Larry is genuinely delightful. His first car was a 1931 Ford Model A. He’s owned more than 100 cars over his life, five of them Mustangs back in 1964 and ’65. But it’s what he says about how he uses FSD that matters here.
“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.
Later, watching the car handle a clear 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.” When the host asks if he trusts it all the way, Larry answers: “I trust it 100%.”
He’s also clear-eyed about the gamble. “It hasn’t made mistakes, and I take a chance that it won’t, but the odds are good. I got the good odds,” he says.
This is exactly what the terms forbid
Tesla renamed the product “FSD (Supervised)” for a reason. It’s a driver-assist system, not an autonomous one, and Tesla’s own disclaimer spells it out: “Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
That means watching the road and staying ready to take over at all times, including at intersections. Intersections are the one place Larry says he’s stopped looking. That’s not a minor technicality. It’s the core safety requirement of the system he’s using.
And his “no mistakes in two or three months” isn’t the reassurance it sounds like. FSD makes mistakes. The car flubs a turn in this very video when it misses the Purple Cow restaurant sign. We’ve been tracking the fatal Autopilot and FSD crashes hidden in Tesla’s data for months. Larry is betting on odds that, over enough miles, run out. And if an error comes at an intersection he’s admittedly not watching, a 98-year-old’s reaction time won’t cover it.
The lawyers are taking notes
Tesla is adding to its growing legal liability. Its entire legal defense in FSD and Autopilot crash cases rests on one argument: the driver is responsible, because the driver is supposed to be supervising.
Then Musk boosts a video of an owner saying, on camera, that he specifically does not supervise.
We reported in June that Tesla promotes FSD misuse in its own official videos, from the one showing a driver making espresso behind the wheel to a Denmark promo full of traffic violations, and how that keeps undermining its own defense. In August, we covered Tesla owners filming themselves breaking the law on FSD for clout. This is the same pattern, now with the CEO’s personal stamp on it.
A Florida jury already found Tesla partly liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and hit it with a $243 million judgment. The company is facing up to $14.5 billion in lawsuits across roughly two dozen separate cases. Every plaintiff’s attorney in that stack now has a fresh clip of Musk personally endorsing a driver who brags about not looking at the road.
Electrek’s Take
I don’t blame Larry one bit. He’s 98, he’s charming, and he’s using FSD exactly the way Tesla’s marketing has implied he can for years. That’s the whole problem.
You can’t rename the product “Supervised,” bury the real requirement in a disclaimer, and then have your CEO spend his weekend amplifying videos of people doing the opposite. Tesla wants to tell a courtroom that the driver is always responsible for supervision while its own feed celebrates a guy saying “I don’t want to look, it’s just doing it.” Those two positions can’t both be true.
FSD is genuinely impressive tech. It’s also nowhere near reliable enough to be used the way Larry is using it, and Tesla knows it, because that’s why the disclaimer exists in the first place. The gap between how Tesla sells FSD and what its own terms demand is precisely what plaintiffs’ lawyers have been prying open, and winning with.
Musk just handed them another exhibit, and this one has his name on it. Tesla keeps encouraging the exact behavior it swears, under oath, that it never endorsed.
The lack of requirement for having your hands on the steering wheel is also problematic here. When there will be an inevitable need to intervene, you can’t expect a 98-year-old who is barely paying attention to react in time. Yet, he will be blamed for it even though if he wasn’t using FSD, the crash wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
I sincerely hope I won’t get to report on Larry again because I know what this will look like. Stay safe out there Larry.
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