Tesla Cybertruck crashes with FSD enabled - what happened?

A lane change went wrong and the electric pick-up truck crashed into a light pole. The driver is OK

The Cybertruck crashed into a pole in Florida

Photo by: Twitter

By: Francesco Barontini

Published by: Brian Potter

Feb 10, 2025 at 5:00am ET

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Is Tesla's full self-driving safe? The statistics say yes. But that does not change the fact that it still requires human supervision. The owner of a Cybertruck equipped with the latest version of the American company's driver assistance software - FSD 13.2.4 - found this out the hard way.

It happened in Florida and, ironically, to a software engineer working in the aerospace industry. Someone who should know a thing or two about software. So what happened?

A sloppy lane change, to say the least

Jonathan Challinger, the unfortunate protagonist of this story, explained that while driving his Cybertruck with full self-driving on and the navigator set to a known destination, he noticed that the vehicle had clumsily veered into the left-hand lane of a road. It hit a kerb and crashed into a lamppost before the driver could intervene.

Judging by the damage, the speed must have been quite high. Fortunately, Challinger suffered no injuries, just a good scare.

Human intervention is still indispensable

What exactly happened is still under investigation. Challinger said he shared his bad experience on social media to warn other drivers that sometimes the unexpected can still happen when relying on Full Self-Driving.

To be fair, however, Tesla, with Elon Musk at the helm, has repeated dozens and dozens of times that its autonomous driving software is not yet at a stage of development where it does not require the constant attention of a human driver.

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"Software in the future will be able to drive without human intervention", Musk said a short while ago. "It will probably happen by the end of the year, but we are not there yet".

Given that the same technology is used by Tesla in Cybercabs, let's hope that for once the American company's number one is right.