Elon Musk spent this week amplifying a video of a Tesla owner who says he no longer looks where his car is going. The owner is 98. Tesla's lawyers are, at the same time, defending roughly two dozen cases whose central argument is that the driver was supposed to be looking.
What is in the clip
The Fast Lane published an interview with Larry, a 98-year-old from Farmington, New Mexico. He has owned more than 100 cars — five Mustangs across 1964 and 1965, starting with a 1931 Ford Model A — and has just bought a Model Y, which he uses with FSD (Supervised) to get around town.
Asked how far he trusts it, he said: "I trust it 100%." Asked about junctions, he said: "I don't want to look at every intersection", and "I don't want to look, it's just doing it."
Sawyer Merritt clipped that section and posted it to X. Musk quote-posted the clip with a heart emoji. It has since passed 9 million views. Tesla North reported the clip on 10 September 2026 and Electrek followed on 11 September.
Why the amplification is the story
The behaviour itself is not rare. Two days earlier a member of Congress counted 43 videos of apparently sleeping Tesla drivers and wrote to the Transportation Secretary about them. What is different here is who promoted it.
FSD (Supervised) carries its supervision requirement in its own name. That requirement is the load-bearing element of Tesla's position in court: when a car running Autopilot or FSD crashes, Tesla argues the driver is responsible, because the driver was meant to be watching.
| Benavides verdict, Miami federal jury | August 2025, $243 million, Tesla held 33% liable |
| Post-trial challenge rejected | 20 February 2026, Judge Beth Bloom |
| Now on appeal | US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, No. 26-10858 |
| Estimated total exposure | up to $14.5 billion across roughly two dozen cases |
Plaintiff lawyers collect this material, and an owner stating on camera that he deliberately does not watch the road is the cleanest possible illustration of the gap between what the manual requires and what the product invites. Published by the chief executive, to millions, it is no longer an owner's misuse — it is company conduct.
It is also a pattern rather than a slip. Tesla has previously been criticised for using footage in its own marketing showing drivers not supervising, and Tesla has quietly settled at least one fatal Autopilot case rather than face a second jury.
What it means in Europe
Legally, nothing yet. None of this litigation is in a European court, and FSD (Supervised) is recognised in only six European markets, running an older build than North America.
The relevance here is regulatory. FSD's route to wider European approval runs through the UNECE framework, and the question in front of those regulators is not whether the software drives competently. It is whether a driver can be relied on to supervise a system good enough to make supervising feel pointless — the precise failure mode Larry describes, cheerfully and on the record.
That is the question a European approval has to answer. Tesla's chief executive has just put a heart on the wrong answer.
Tesla has not commented.