What appears to be the same detestable Tesla owner was spotted in the highly illegal, incredibly dangerous, and massively stupid act of sitting in the backseat with the Tesla in autopilot mode.

While apartheid trust-funder Elon Musk is off preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, his trendy electric car company Tesla has a very significant problem that Musk is apparently willing to leave to Corporate Legal. Namely, that police say no one was behind the wheel of a fatal Tesla Model S crash last month that killed two people in Texas. Musk insists autopilot was not enabled, but Texas police are serving search warrants for data to verify that claim.


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But the genie was then out of the bottle, as Consumer Reports verified that a Tesla can go into autopilot mode with no one in the driver’s seat. This seems to have been an open secret among Tesla fanbois for awhile, and in the last week, three social media posts from different days purport to show the same Tesla “driver” riding alone, in the backseat, with no one behind the driver’s wheel.

Each incident is from a social media account, and unconfirmed, but there are unmistakable similarities to indicate it’s the same driver in each case, and enough context to know these images and videos were indeed shot in the Bay Area. The first of these popped up a week ago on the Twitter account of a @bobbyShafto10, and it’s unclear whether the driver is in the front or back seat in the photo. But the post’s author tags the San Francisco office of the California Highway Patrol, saying, “Does @CHPSanFrancisco care whether people are in the drivers seat of their new Teslas or not? This guy climbed back into the front seat when he noticed me looking at him chillin’ in the back. Plate BJ09C06.”

We see the exact same license plate number in the above Youtube video entitled “Another dumba** abusing Tesla AP,” posted to a Tesla-focused Youtube channel called Ingineerix. “This was sighted in Berkeley, CA on May 4th 2021 on the University overpass crossing I-80.  Had CA paper tag (new car) ‘BJ09C06’.  I hope Tesla will see this and revoke his Autopilot.” In this case, the fellow seems far less camera-shy.

The original post to Reddit above was posted on Monday, with the backseat driver again in a white ballcap, in a similarly colored Tesla, and the telltale cranes showing that this is a Bay Bridge onramp. The original poster claims the driver is “Driving in the backseat of his Model 3 with his foot on the wheel,” which is not 100% verifiable in the photo, but would be consistent with the Tesla autopilot requirement that the driver “has their hands on the wheel.” Which… maybe you can fool the system by using your foot?

Again, these are all social media posts whose claims cannot be verified, but three is certainly a pattern. And it is 100% verified that Tesla’s autopilot can be tricked into driving with no one in the driver’s seat. It seems shocking that all of this vaunted Artificial Intelligence technology created by these so-called genius visionaries can be easily duped with simple Rube Goldberg tricks. And were that not so scary and genuinely deadly, it would be funnier than anything on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live.

Related: Tesla's Fremont Factory Doubled as COVID-19 Hotspot in 2020, New Report Suggests [SFist]

Image Ingineerix via Youtube