The car manufacturer Tesla has paved the way in building electric cars for the mainstream market and creating the needed infrastructure of batteries, chargers, solar panels, and stationary battery systems. In addition, in 2013, its CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would introduce a system of autonomous driving cars allowing to take 90% of the control away from the driver within the next three years (Carroll, 2013). Although the fully autonomous Tesla is still a dream of the future, the company has invested heavily in self-driving technology during the last decade, starting with the launch of the so-called Autopilot in October 2014. The intelligent assistant for lane control was eventually updated to what the company calls ‘Full Self Driving’ (FSD), which should extend autonomous driving beyond the motorway, requiring the driver to take over only in certain situations. Although the technology has considerable flaws and resulted in several fatal accidents (Samineh Gillmore & Tenhundfeld, 2020), it has attracted a vital community of drivers, acting as beta-testers for new software releases, sharing their expertise, and offering deep insights into the feelings and imaginaries of what it means to pioneer automated driving.

To cope with a car that is perceived as 99% safe and 1% deadly, as one Redditor puts it, it is argued that drivers have to develop an imaginary integrating this unpredictability into their driving experience. The friction between technical mastery and autonomous technology (Winner, 1977) is described as ‘wildness’, referring to the joy of using autonomous technology that is not entirely tamed. Accordingly, drivers perceive themself as trainers and tamers reporting bugs and critical situations to the developers and taking their car to specific challenges after an update to test if its performance has improved: “It still tries to kill me, but less often.”