Tesla's FSD Saw the Oncoming Vehicle and Turned Into Its Path Anyway
What happened
The near-miss on a country road in February 2025 would have been a head-on collision if the driver had not grabbed the wheel. The footage, which circulated widely after being posted online, shows a Tesla Cybertruck moving in a straight line before its Full Self-Driving software initiates a left turn into what appears to be a driveway entrance, directly across the path of an oncoming SUV. The driver, caught off guard, yanked the steering yoke and avoided the crash, audibly exclaiming in the process.
What made the incident more troubling than a typical near-miss was what the Cybertruck's own dashboard displayed at the moment of the turn. The FSD system had identified the approaching vehicle. Its detection logic registered the oncoming car as present, and it turned anyway. The system's intent to execute the left turn did not change when it perceived an object in the path that maneuver would cross. The driver's intervention was not a backup to a system that hadn't seen the hazard; it was a correction to one that had seen it and proceeded regardless.
This occurred within days of a separate, widely reported incident in which a Cybertruck using FSD drove into a pole. The proximity of the two events sharpened criticism of Tesla's ongoing rollout of FSD to paying customers on public roads. Tesla has positioned Full Self-Driving as a supervised driver assistance feature, which places the obligation to monitor and override on the human in the seat. Critics argue that the name and the marketing around it communicate something materially different from what the legal fine print reserves.
The deeper concern the incident surfaces is about what supervised autonomy means in practice when a system can identify a hazard, flag it on a display, and continue toward it. A driver watching a dashboard that shows an oncoming vehicle detected has reasonable grounds to trust that detection will influence what the car does next. When it does not, the interface has told the driver something true and the system has done something inconsistent with it. That gap between detection and action is not a missed edge case; it is a failure in the logic that connects perception to decision.
There is currently no standardized requirement that autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle systems produce a verified, inspectable log of what they perceived in the seconds before a critical maneuver, what they intended to do, and what override was applied. The Cybertruck footage exists because a bystander happened to record it. A provable record of what a system did, constructed automatically, would not have prevented this near-miss, but it would have turned an internet video into auditable evidence, giving regulators and the public a shared basis for evaluating whether full self-driving belongs on the roads it is already occupying.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.