Another Tesla Full Self-Driving crash. Another death. Another round of online social media denials that follow a script as predictable as a Pinto’s design failures.

Take for example a Tesla Model Y that struck and killed a motorcyclist in Washington state while operating in FSD mode. Within hours of the news breaking, Tesla’s online community had deployed its standard “no true Scotsman” fallacy army: this wasn’t real FSD, the investigation is biased, and anyone reporting on it is part of a coordinated attack.

Scripted Donkey Deployments

When an Arizona FSD fatality started getting attention a couple days ago, Reddit’s r/TeslaFSD immediately spun into emergency response:

• “This was running 11 which had known issues. We’re on 12 now which completely fixes this problem. Misleading to call this an FSD issue when it’s ancient software.”
• “Convenient how all these ‘investigations’ happen right before earnings calls. Follow the money – who benefits from Tesla’s stock price dropping?”
• “The NHTSA has been gunning for Tesla since day one. They never investigate Ford or GM crashes this aggressively. Pure bias.”

The pattern of information warfare is consistent across every Tesla FSD fatality: minimize the death, question the timing, attack the investigators. What’s missing is any acknowledgment that experimental software killed someone.

Investigations Branded “Conspiracies”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) didn’t investigate Tesla from 2016 to 2020 because of political corruption.

Then, after Trump no longer could press his thumb on regulators, it opened investigation into Tesla’s FSD technology and started documenting multiple crashes involving the system. This is standard procedure – when a particular technology shows up repeatedly in fatal crashes, safety regulators investigate.

Tesla’s online defenders see coordination where none exists:

• “Weird how the Washington Post, Reuters, and CNN all covered this crash within 24 hours. Almost like they’re all reading from the same script 🤔”
• “Amazing how NHTSA always finds ‘new evidence’ right when Tesla stock is doing well. These people are compromised.”

The fact that multiple commenters are saying “it’s coordinated” while following an identical, predictable response pattern is pure irony. They’re the ones who are coordinated – coordinated in their denial.

Their response also treats routine journalism as unusual or suspicious. When a Tesla crashes and kills someone, that’s news. When multiple outlets report on it, that’s how news works. The alternative would be a media blackout on Tesla fatalities, which is apparently what Tesla would prefer. If you report, you violate their implied censorship. It’s kind of like how lynchings worked in 1830s “cancel culture” America.

The Dumb Theseus Game

Perhaps the most cynical aspect of the Tesla fan response is “version” gaming by dismissing every crash as irrelevant because software is updated constantly. This is the ship of Theseus weaponizes. Every nail pounded into a plank means the entire boat is different and can’t be compared anymore to any other.

• “Literally nobody is running v11 anymore. This crash tells us nothing about current FSD capabilities. Yellow journalism at its finest.”
• “By the time this investigation concludes, we’ll be 3 versions ahead. NHTSA investigating 2-year-old software like it’s current. Completely useless.”

This logic renders every Tesla crash investigation meaningless by the dumbest design in history. Since Tesla continuously updates software, no crash can ever be considered relevant evidence of the technology’s safety problems. It’s a perfect unfalsifiability shield.

And, perhaps most importantly, it proves the company is LEARNING NOTHING from data. Learning is impossible if you accept that every version is an entirely new start, unrelated to the prior code. In other words, we should expect later Tesla versions to be worse instead of better, which arguably has been proven true by accelerating death rates.

Deflection Addiction

The online response follows a clear hierarchy of deflection:

• Level 1: Blame the victim
  • “Motorcycle was probably speeding”
  • “Driver should have taken over”
  • “Darwin Award winner”
• Level 2: Dismiss the software version
  • “That’s yesterday’s FSD”
  • “Tomorrow’s version fixes everything”
  • “Misleading headline”
• Level 3: Attack independent assessors
  • “Government bias”
  • “Media conspiracy”
  • “Coordinated FUD campaign”
• Level 4: Claim victimhood
  • “They’re trying to kill our beliefs”
  • “Legacy media hates us for disrupting”
  • “Short sellers jealously spreading lies”

Notice what’s absent: any substantive discussion of why FSD beta software failed to detect and avoid a car, a pole, a person, a motorcycle… and more people are being killed in “veered” Tesla crashes than ever.

Human Cost Gets Tossed

While Tesla fans debate software versions and media bias, the human impact disappears from the conversation. The Washington state crash left a motorcyclist dead and a family grieving. The Tesla driver will likely carry psychological trauma from the incident. These consequences don’t get undone by a software update.

This is just another hit piece trying to slow down progress. How many lives will be saved when FSD is perfected? The media never mentions that.

This utilitarian argument – that current deaths are acceptable in service of future safety – would be remarkable coming from any other industry. Imagine if pharmaceutical companies dismissed drug deaths as necessary sacrifices for medical progress, or if airlines shrugged off crashes as the price of innovation.

Real-Time Regulatory Capture

The Tesla fan community has effectively created a form of regulatory capture through social media pressure. Any investigation into Tesla crashes gets immediately branded as biased, coordinated, or motivated by anti-innovation sentiment.

• “The same people investigating Tesla crashes drive Ford and GM cars. Conflict of interest much? These investigations are jokes.”
• “NHTSA investigators probably have shorts positions in Tesla. Someone should check their portfolios.”

This creates an environment where legitimate safety concerns can’t be raised without facing accusations of conspiracy or bias. The result is that Tesla’s experimental software gets treated as beyond criticism, even when it kills people.

Broken Pattern Continues

Tesla continues to market “Full Self-Driving” to customers who may not understand they’re participating in a public beta test where the stakes are measured in human lives rather than software bugs.

The lawn darts were banned in 1988 after a single child died. They didn’t get software updates. They didn’t have online defenders explaining why each injury was actually the fault of an outdated dart version. They just got pulled from the market because toys aren’t supposed to kill people.

Tesla’s FSD has killed dozens if not hundreds of people. The response has been deflection, software updates and social media disinformation. The pattern will continue until the regulatory response changes – or until Tesla’s online army can no longer hide the body count in their unmarked digital mass grave like it’s 1921 in Tulsa again.