Daniel Milligan didn’t plan on a swimming lesson last Saturday. His Tesla, running the latest Full Self-Driving software version 14.2.2.4, apparently had other ideas and steered toward a lake with the quiet confidence of a system that has never been wrong before.
The former SpaceX engineer posted the video on X, tagging Tesla and Autopilot AI lead Ashok Elluswamy with a message refreshingly free of corporate euphemisms: “My Tesla tried to get me killed today”. Over 1.2 million views and a comment section ranging from horror to dark comedy confirmed that the internet understood the assignment.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s a pattern. In May 2025, a Tesla running FSD suddenly veered off the road and rolled another vehicle in an accident the driver said was impossible to prevent. In December, a Chinese Tesla driver livestreaming FSD capabilities captured the moment the system initiated a lane change directly into oncoming traffic. And two Tesla influencers attempting Elon Musk’s much-hyped coast-to-coast FSD road trip didn’t make it out of California before hitting road debris. The highlight reel writes itself.
Tesla describes build v14.2.2.4 as a refined and polished update over the previous v14.2.2.3, featuring an upgraded neural network vision encoder for higher resolution and improved handling around emergency vehicles. Lakes, apparently, remain a work in progress.
The regulatory picture is correspondingly grim. In October 2025, the NHTSA opened a formal investigation covering 2.88 million Tesla vehicles after linking 58 accidents to the FSD system, including 14 crashes and 23 injuries. The agency is specifically focused on red-light violations and wrong-way driving. Fundamental failures that shouldn’t exist in any system, let alone one Tesla charges $99 per month to access.
A separate NHTSA investigation targets Tesla’s alleged failure to properly and promptly report Autopilot and FSD-related incidents to regulators. The combined death toll from accidents involving Tesla’s driver assistance systems now exceeds 50.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s “unsupervised” Robotaxi program in Austin has proven to require considerably more supervision than the name implies, eight months after its launch. At some point, the gap between Elon Musk’s press releases and the NHTSA’s incident reports stops being ironic and starts being a liability.
