Another week, another headline about a Tesla on Autopilot doing something a licensed human would never do.
This time it's a driver reportedly asleep at the wheel while his car barreled down a highway at 70 miles per hour.
The footage went viral, as it always does.
And as always, the comment sections split into two camps: the true believers who insist this is the future, and the rest of us wondering when exactly we agreed to share the road with a science experiment.
Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody at Tesla wants to say out loud.
It's a driver-assistance system, which means a human is still supposed to be watching the road, hands near the wheel, ready to take over.
They treat it like a nanny, a chauffeur, a chance to answer one more email or scroll through one more feed.
And the technology, for all its cameras and sensors, keeps letting them.
The pattern has become grimly predictable.
It turns out the driver was checked out, trusting the car to handle something it couldn't.
Meanwhile, the cars keep selling, the feature keeps getting rebranded with ever more confident names, and the death toll quietly ticks upward.
What makes this a distinctly American problem is how we got here.
No consumer group demanded the right to nap on the interstate.
Silicon Valley decided that moving fast and breaking things should apply to two-ton machines sharing space with school buses and minivans.
We were told the bugs would get ironed out.
The real scandal isn't that the technology is imperfect.
Calling something "Full Self-Driving" when it demonstrably isn't is not a branding choice.
It's a promise, and people are dying on the strength of it.
When a company sells a feature with a name that implies the driver can disengage, some drivers will disengage.
And the rest of us are stuck in the passenger seat of this experiment whether we bought a Tesla or not.
Every drowsy driver lulled by a smooth highway cruise is a hazard to the family in the Honda next to them.
Every viral clip of someone climbing into the backseat normalizes the idea that this is fine.
It's a slow-motion collapse of basic road etiquette dressed up as innovation.
The fix isn't complicated, though it may be unpopular.
Stop naming features after capabilities they don't have.
Make driver monitoring genuinely hard to defeat.
And hold companies accountable when their marketing outruns their engineering.
Until then, keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road, especially when the car beside you is silent and suspiciously steady.
Final Thoughts
It's a trust story, and trust, once spent, doesn't recharge with a software update.