My Tesla Drove Me to the Park at 6:30am. I Never Asked It To.

Not my Tesla

I have a Tesla.

Go ahead. Roll your eyes. Get it out of your system. I’ll wait.

Done? Good. Because this isn’t about the car. It’s about what happened when I decided to stop driving it.

It was early. One of those quiet weekend mornings where the streets are empty and the light is doing something beautiful that nobody’s awake to notice. Coffee in hand, house still asleep, heading out for bagels.

I got in the car. Opened the map screen. Was about to type in the address. And then I stopped.

I knew Tesla’s FSD, Full Self-Driving, can drive without a destination. You don’t tell it where to go. You just turn it on and let it decide. I knew this. Never tried it.

6:30am. Empty streets. Coffee in hand. Nobody watching.

I closed the navigation, turned on FSD, and said out loud to nobody in particular: “Okay. Just go.”

And it did.

Within the first two minutes, it doubled back and drove past my own house. Slowly. Deliberately. Like it was thinking about something.

I live there. It knows I live there. It has the HOME address saved. It chose to drive past it anyway at a pace that felt almost contemplative, then continued down the street without explanation.

I looked back at my house through the rear window. The car did not.

About seven minutes in, we hit a roundabout.

Once. Fine. Normal.

Twice. I sat up a little straighter.

Three times. I put my coffee down.

Then it exited. Casually. Smoothly. Like absolutely nothing had happened. Three laps of a residential roundabout at 6:30 in the morning, filed under routine driving decisions.

I looked around. A truck driver at the gas station just off the roundabout gave me a long puzzled look. I shrugged. He went back to his coffee. We never spoke of it again.

Then it pulled into the parking lot of my gym. The one I hardly go to.

It navigated through the lot slowly, deliberately, like it knew exactly where it was going. Made its way toward the front entrance. And then something interesting happened.

It didn’t fully stop. It slowed down almost to a halt, close enough to the front door that the message was clear. Then came the jitter. A small, almost nervous hesitation. Like it was pausing just long enough for me to make a decision. Like it was saying “I’m going to slow down right here, right in front of the door, and I’m going to give you exactly one moment to do the right thing.”

I did not do the right thing.

I sat there. Coffee in hand. Looking straight ahead, ignoring what was presented to me.

The car read the room. Waited one more beat. Then quietly pulled away from the entrance, exited the parking lot, and got back on the road without a word.

No judgment. No passive aggressive notification. Just a quiet, data-driven suggestion from a machine that apparently knows my habits better than I’d like to admit.

It knew. It’s always known. It just didn’t want to have that argument at 6:30 in the morning either.

Twenty minutes in. It slowed down. Turned into a parking area I recognized immediately. One of the larger parks in the neighborhood. The one with the long walking trail.

It pulled in. Found a spot. And parked.

Not lost. Not confused. Just done. It put itself in park and the screen went quiet.

I sat there for a second, coffee still in hand, looking out at the trail.

The bagels never happened.

I got out and went for a walk. And somewhere on that trail, the shorter one, still holding my coffee, I started thinking about what just happened. Which is a strange thing to say, because I build AI for a living.

Machine learning, automation, DevSecOps, intelligent systems. Every single day. And yet sitting in that car, watching it make decisions I didn’t program and didn’t predict, felt like something I wasn’t fully prepared for.

What route was it using? Was it pulling from roads it had driven before? Optimizing for something? Completely random? I genuinely don’t know. And I build this kind of stuff.

That’s the part that stays with me. Not the technology. The feeling.

This is a glimpse of where we’re going. Not someday. Now. The technology exists. The experience already happened. And the more time passes, the more this becomes not a novelty but a normal Saturday morning.

We built this. We’re going to have to accept it.

And honestly? Maybe the car was right about all of it.

The bagels could wait.

The walk was needed.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to go to the gym more often. We’ll see, it’s not the boss of me :)