Tesla's Full Self-Driving tries to drive owner into lake, raising fresh safety concerns

Tesla Owner Captures FSD Driving Toward Lake

A Tesla owner's nighttime drive nearly ended in an unexpected swim when his vehicle, operating on Full Self-Driving version 14.2.2.4, mistook a boat ramp for a road and accelerated toward a lake. Daniel Milligan, a former SpaceX engineer, shared the footage on Sunday, tagging both Tesla and Ashok Elluswamy, the company's head of Autopilot AI1

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. The viral video shows the car gently turning right onto what appears to be a boat ramp, then accelerating toward the water before Milligan hit the brakes. "My Tesla tried to drive me into a lake today!" he wrote in a post that quickly accumulated over 1.2 million views, 9,000 likes, and hundreds of reposts2

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Repeatable FSD Failures Under Different Conditions

Milligan explained his intended destination was a driveway approximately fifty feet away from where the Tesla FSD incident occurred. Testing the same route during daylight hours revealed the issue was repeatable at night but not during the day. "Just tried it again during the day (same direction and destination) and it completely skipped the boat ramp," Milligan reported, suggesting the error stemmed from lighting conditions affecting the AI's ability to distinguish the lake from the road1

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. In a follow-up video posted to X, Milligan demonstrated the problem occurring again, writing: "Here is a video I took inside the car to prove I didn't fake it. It's repeatable at night"3

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. This lake incident represents a particularly dangerous edge case where the driver assistance feature failed to recognize a fundamental hazard.

Growing Pattern of Dangerous FSD Failures

The lake incident joins a troubling catalog of FSD failures that raise questions about the system's readiness for widespread deployment. In May 2025, a Tesla on FSD suddenly veered off road and flipped a car upside down in a crash the driver said he could not prevent. In December, a Tesla driver in China crashed head-on into another vehicle during a livestream demonstrating FSD features when the system initiated a lane change into oncoming traffic2

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. Tesla's Full Self-Driving has a documented habit of driving straight into the path of oncoming trains, and both FSD and its predecessor Autopilot have been involved in numerous deadly crashes, including over 50 deaths related to incidents involving Tesla's driver-assistance systems1

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. The system is classified as a driver assistance feature requiring active driver supervision, despite its name suggesting otherwise.

NHTSA Investigation and Regulatory Pressure Intensifies

The incident arrives as Tesla faces mounting regulatory pressure over its self-driving cars. In October 2025, NHTSA launched a broad investigation into 2.88 million Tesla vehicles after connecting 58 incidents to FSD, including 14 crashes and 23 injuries2

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. The NHTSA investigation specifically focuses on FSD running red lights and driving into opposing lanes of traffic—fundamental failures that shouldn't occur in a system Tesla charges $99 per month for. NHTSA also opened a separate probe into Tesla's failure to properly report Autopilot and FSD crashes to regulators in a timely manner2

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. The FSD version 14.2.2.4 build involved in the lake incident rolled out in late January 2026, with Tesla characterizing it as a polished and fine-tuned software update that upgraded the neural network vision encoder for higher resolution features.

Marketing Claims Versus Reality for Tesla

Despite these incidents, Tesla owner enthusiasm often persists. Milligan still considers FSD a "game changer," though he admits it "needs more work before it's fully autonomous"1

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. The gap between what Tesla sells and what FSD actually delivers remains substantial. Elon Musk has been promising "unsupervised" FSD since 2016, yet the company's Robotaxi program in Austin has proven to be anything but unsupervised2

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. Tesla moved FSD to a subscription-only model in February, effectively admitting the system is a service rather than the asset it was sold as for years. This shift may signal Tesla no longer needs to promise the system will become unsupervised, potentially marking the end of an era of ambitious autonomy claims that haven't materialized. With viral video shows of dangerous FSD failures continuing to surface and regulatory scrutiny intensifying, the question facing NHTSA is whether Tesla can continue marketing this technology as "Full Self-Driving" while vehicles attempt to navigate drivers into lakes.