A duo of Tesla shareholder-influencers tried to complete Elon Musk’s coast-to-coast self-driving ride that he claimed Tesla would be able to do in 2017 and they crashed before making it about 60 miles.
In 2016, Elon Musk infamously said that Tesla would complete a fully self-driving coast-to-coast drive between Los Angeles and New York by the end of 2017.
The idea was to livestream or film a full unedited drive coast-to-coast with the vehicle driving itself at all times.
We are in 2025 and Tesla never made that drive.
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Despite the many missed autonomous driving goals, many Tesla shareholders believe that the company is on the verge of delivering unsupervised self-driving following the rollout of its ‘Robotaxi’ fleet in Austin, which requires supervision from Tesla employees inside the vehicles, and improvements to its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) systems inside consumer vehicles, which is still only a level 2 driver assist system that requires driver attention at all times as per Tesla.
Two of these Tesla shareholders and online influencers attempted to undertake a coast-to-coast drive between San Diego, CA, and Jacksonville, FL, in a Tesla Model Y equipped with the latest FSD software update.
They didn’t make it out of California without crashing into easily avoidable road debris that badly damaged the Tesla Model Y:
In the video, you can see that the driver doesn’t have his hands on the steering wheel. The passenger spots the debris way ahead of time. There was plenty of time to react, but the driver didn’t get his hands on the steering wheel until the last second.
In a follow-up video, the two Tesla influencers confirmed that the Model Y had a broken sway bar bracket and damaged suspension components. The vehicle is also throwing out a lot of warnings.
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