Technology is there to be exploited. And when your car has an autopilot with cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and artificial intelligence, it’s imperative to test its capabilities.
This is what Zach and his girlfriend, Hailee, came up with when they decided to ask their Tesla to take them to a place they’d never been before. The car, of course, responded, though without giving any clues about the destination.
In a video posted on TikTok, which has over six million views, the American couple appears curious and astonished to know where the car is taking them.
After a few minutes of automatic travel, the hint becomes clear: the place they’d never been to before was a gym. “The car wants to give you a hint,” they sarcastically respond in the post. Zach, who is heavily built, quickly takes the hint.
@zachandhailee Tesla got jokes!! Let’s try this again last time it took me to planet fitness
♬ original sound – ZachAndHailee
Assisted driving with a certain algorithmic humor
From the beginning, Elon Musk’s company has been notoriously controversial about the introduction of automated driving in its vehicles. Thanks to an assistance system called Autopilot, the car takes control of steering, braking, and acceleration under certain circumstances.
According to Tesla itself, this technology is included in all its models and keeps the car within its lane, with the corresponding surrounding traffic.
There’s no concrete evidence or information about how the algorithms for this assistance work , but it is known that the cars can learn from the driver’s habits and from the neural network that collects data from millions of kilometers traveled by other Teslas.
In the words of Elon Musk himself, on X: “The more kilometers our users drive, the smarter the system becomes.”
This is due to the package that, since 2023, adds more advanced features to the system, called Full Self-Driving (FSD), which analyzes all this data and input. So, can a Tesla really have a sense of humor?
The answer isn’t definitive, but in Zach and Hailee’s case, it’s most likely that the FSD algorithm interpreted some parameters such as proximity, accessibility, or common places of interest to “troll” a gym. Or perhaps, as many users joke in the video’s comments, the car already has “its own opinions.”