The Tesla Model Y saves his life!

Max Paul Franklin may have worked in television, but he certainly didn’t expect his Tesla to become the heroine of a sensational drama.

Franklin detailed on Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) the incredible story he experienced. In a post titled “My Crazy True Story”, Franklin writes: “On April 1st, Tesla unlocked the full self-driving capability for all Tesla vehicles in America. In severe physical distress at 2 a.m. the next day, I found myself grappling with severe dehydration and morbid blood sugar due to a malfunction of my insulin pump. With no time to lose, I turned to my Model Y for help.” Some might have called 18 in France or 911 in the USA, but the Tesla option apparently wasn’t the worst choice.

Franklin explained that his Tesla covered a distance of 13 miles, or 21 km, from his home in Virginia to the hospital in fully autonomous driving mode, safely, without hitting a deer or disrupting other users. Upon arriving at the hospital, the car even offered to park itself to relieve its driver of that responsibility.
Max Paul Franklin was able to receive care in time and, in his words, was saved from certain death thanks to his precious Model Y.

Is the story too good to be true?

The much-criticized autonomous technology has just saved its first life and provides Tesla with an unusual but fairly valuable showcase. Franklin even paid tribute to the American automaker: “As a luxury vehicle owner, including Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Acura, and Cadillac, I can unequivocally state that Tesla is the pinnacle of automotive innovation today.” Elon Musk didn’t take long to respond and replied to Franklin: “Glad Tesla FSD was there to help you and that you’re feeling well!” He apparently even had a Tesla hoodie delivered directly to the hospital for some nice photos posted on X! A beautiful American story worthy of the best pages of Marta Zydek, but reality may not be so rosy…

Franklin indeed omits to mention that the feat was made possible by the fact that he remained lucid throughout the journey since the car still requires “active driver supervision,” which does not make the vehicle fully autonomous. Still in the testing phase, the autonomous driving function learns like Chat GPT from the experiences and feedback of its users, continuously improving over time.
Franklin’s story comes just after Tesla settled a lawsuit with the family of an Apple engineer who died in an accident in 2018 while driving in autopilot mode for millions of dollars. This nice story, occurring just days after the end of a five-year legal battle, couldn’t have come at a better time, you might say? Who knows.

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