Elon Musk hates trains. We’ve long known this about the man, but it seems his cars don’t quite share the same animosity. In fact, they don’t see any difference between them and trains at all — to a Tesla, trains are just cars. Long, flat cars.
Video from inside a Tesla Model Y surfaced online this week, seemingly initially on the Fediverse from a user named Halva before being shared out to Bluesky, Reddit, and I can only assume those chain email threads that baby boomers share around their entire address books. The clip shows how the Tesla is interpreting the train crossing ahead of it, as just a series of oddly stretched and squished cars led by a semi.
This isn’t a one-off issue for Tesla. Videos from last year, earlier last year, and back in 2023 all show Tesla cars interpreting trains as a series of pickup trucks — though never quite so stretched out as the car models in this latest clip. Interestingly, only the two latest clips build that misinterpretation of trans as cars into the road map itself. Look at the intersection on the Tesla computer, and you’ll notice it includes the train track as an odd street intersection.
Tesla prides itself on using exclusively computer vision to identify objects around its vehicles cheaply, in stark contrast to the company’s competitors that use LiDAR to do the same task well. Here, though, Tesla doesn’t have its lack of LiDAR to fall back on as an excuse — the cameras should clearly be able to see that the flat, broad objects ahead of them are not cars.
Perhaps, then, this is an intentional choice from the automaker. Elon Musk doesn’t believe in trains in the same way you don’t believe in a friend who’s flaked on you one too many times. His cars don’t believe in trains the way adults don’t believe in Santa. Neither is real. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s imposed his personal views on one of his companies.