Don’t Listen to Tesla Fans on Social Media. FSD Did Not Just Prevent a Plane Crash

Look how proud Elon Musk’s mom is of her son’s car company:

Definitely wow 😮 @Tesla 👏👏👏 https://t.co/ZTbkZq2wSu

— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) October 25, 2025

There’s nothing wrong with a mother praising her billionaire son—who among us wouldn’t do the same?—but the post she’s embedding is hogwash. The party deserving of praise here is Matthew Topchian, a quick-thinking human motorist who took evasive action using his hands and feet, which are made of flesh and blood.

On Thursday, a military prop plane had a shaky emergency landing, followed by a crash on a dusty back road on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Two people were on board, but neither was injured. There was, however, a fire, sparked when the plane collided with two utility poles. It also buzzed a Tesla ambling along minding its own business, narrowly avoiding catastrophe. (Incidentally, this kind of plane is used to destroy coca leaf crops in South America).

Now Maye Musk is just one of countless Tesla fans on Elon Musk’s X applauding the company’s assisted driver mode for deftly avoiding a tragic collision between vehicles with the potential to claim lives.

Problem is, according to a post by the guy driving the car, he was driving the old fashioned way, and believes that if he hadn’t been, it would have crashed.

The problem X post is from someone named David Bellow, and reads in part “WOW! Tesla full self driving dodges a freaking plane falling out of the sky!”

Over on TikTok, where the near miss was originally posted by a guy named Matthew Topchian (whose identity was confirmed by his local news station) a reply asked if the car was in manual or self-driving mode, and Topchian’s reply is categorical: “Manually, the fsd is really good but it woulda absolutely macked that plane.” Translation from hastily-typing-on-a-smartphone-ese: I was driving manually. While Tesla’s assisted driving mode is excellent, if I had been using it at the time, I am confident that plane would have been tragically destroyed.

The X post has since received a community note, correcting the record about the driver not using FSD, and Bellow knows this, but he’s not deleting, and he’s posted that he plans to do his own research, thank you very much. “I’m gonna have to hear it from Matthew himself that he wasn’t driving in full self driving because that’s not the story I heard,” Bellow wrote. Also, he says, “the note only references one comment on a TikTok and the only video on that TikTok account is this video. Could be a bot account or maybe Matthew likes the idea of people thinking he’s a racecar driver and changed his initial story.” For sure, yeah, totally!

Bellow’s post is absolutely being taken as fact. It’s received millions of views, and quote tweet text includes rather terrifyingly misinformed statements like “The Tesla self driving car has reached a level of safety I did not think was possible for another decade,” and “Autopilot dodged a plane. That’s not self-driving — that’s situational awareness on wheels…”