Driving Change: Who Sets the Speed Limit

By Michel Shane · Sat Oct 31 2026

The most important feature at Elon Musk's car launch two weeks ago was a robot. An Optimus humanoid sat behind the wheel of the new Tesla Roadster, posed for show, while the car ran a routine its engineers had programmed. No human was needed. I doubt one would have enjoyed the ride. The show took place October 15 at a SpaceX rocket test site in McGregor, Texas. A stripped stunt car, which an Edmunds reporter in the crowd called "a skeleton of a Roadster," climbed a curved ramp until it hung upside down 69 feet above the ground, held there by suction fans. Then it flipped through the air and jumped a row of parked Teslas.

Musk told a crowd of more than a thousand they were there to prove none of it was AI. Some of it they never saw. People watching the livestream say the flight sequences and the zero-to-60 sprint happened somewhere out of sight, and the audience got them on a screen. After a recorded run and a timer that acted up, a presenter announced a live run of 0.81 seconds, a number nobody outside Tesla measured. At the end, the car customers might actually buy rolled onto the stage and sat there looking pretty.

I've spent my life making movies, and I've seen this one before. In 2018, a truck company called Nikola released footage of its new rig cruising down a highway. Prosecutors later showed it had been rolling downhill.

Tesla's cars really did move under their own power. But a stunt car is a long way from a production car. Anyone who's made a movie knows the method: shoot the film, build a special prop, and let the audience assume the real thing works.Tim Higgins, a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote a book on Tesla, put it plainer: "The only thing that really mattered was the video clips created to trend on social media."

I'm no enemy of invention. More than 20 years ago I shepherded I, Robot to the screen, starting from Hardwired, a screenplay I optioned. Audi built a car for Will Smith to drive in that film, the RSQ. A few years later, its lines showed up on the street as the Audi R8, after Audi did the slow work of making it legal to sell. Two weeks ago, the 2004 science fiction put a robot in the driver's seat.

Let Musk fling the Roadster off every ramp in Texas. My quarrel starts where the test track ends and Pacific Coast Highway begins.

You don't have to love cars to worry about this one. Reaching 60 in 0.81 seconds means accelerating at more than three times the force of gravity. Your head weighs about 11 pounds. For that instant, your neck has to push with roughly 37 pounds just to keep it moving with the car.

The thrusters run on air stored at 10,000 pounds per square inch. A scuba tank holds about 3,000. Ask yourself what happens to a tank like that in a crash, or to the cyclist stopped behind the car at a red light on PCH when it fires.

Musk didn't pretend otherwise. "This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car," he told the crowd, according to Engadget. He also said the Roadster will be the only Tesla a human drives. For years, Tesla has sold self-driving as the way to make roads safer. Yet the one car it saves for human hands is the one its own boss won't call safety optimized.

Tesla's website calls the base Roadster "road-ready." The Thrust version, with the rear thrusters, is "race-ready." The Rocket, with what Tesla calls "a full flight system," isn't approved for public roads. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn't wait for the paperwork. "We will make sure that it's legal," he posted the night of the launch.

Now think about who'll drive it. Somewhere, a parent wealthy enough to buy one will hand the keys to a 17-year-old who's held a license for a year. Even the road-ready version, with no thrusters, reaches 60 in 1.6 seconds, according to Tesla. Teenagers already crash more than any other drivers, and they do it in ordinary cars.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulates this car. But carmakers certify their own vehicles against federal safety standards written for cars that don't blast compressed air at the traffic behind them. So a new kind of risk could reach the street with its maker grading its own exam. If that happens, we'd better find more room in our graveyards.

Back home, the speed cameras on PCH begin test operation in November. Sixty-four people have died on our 21 miles of highway since 2010, and everything we've fought for comes down to one principle: nobody gets to decide alone how fast is safe. Those cameras will catch a Roadster like any other car, but a camera watches one spot, and a car that reaches 60 in less than a second can do it in the stretch between them.

Musk's companies made news for speed twice that week. One story was a car that hits 60 in under a second. The other was a speed limit.

On October 14, Ukrainian drone crews lost full access to the military version of Starlink, without warning, for any terminal moving faster than about 100 miles an hour. Ukrainian forces said their interceptor drones could no longer fly fast enough to catch the Russian jet drones hitting Kyiv. President Zelenskyy called it "a big mistake" that "will bring a lot of human losses."

Musk posted that the US military decides such limits. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth answered that Starlink "has the option to make decisions concerning its terms of service." The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported that Musk ordered the slowdown himself. Four days before it began, he had posted on X: "Zelensky has gone too far."

Ten days later, the service came back after the president called Musk and asked him to restore it, according to U.S. officials quoted by the Journal. Musk explained himself afterward, on X. Ukraine had "violated Starlink terms of service," he wrote, and "that loophole was closed last week." Ukraine says SpaceX never told it about any violation.

So by the Journal's account, one man put a speed limit on a war, held it for ten days and lifted it after a phone call. Every speed limit on PCH comes with a sign and an agency behind it. When one is wrong, I know whose office to call.

NHTSA should make clear, before the first Roadster ships, which safety standards apply and how Tesla will show it meets them. Tesla should have to prove its claims through independent testing. And regulators should decide whether a car that fires compressed air at other road users belongs on a public street at all.

When a man tells you his car isn't built for safety, believe him.

Musk can set any record he likes on his test track. He doesn't set the speed limit on Pacific Coast Highway.

I can be reached at: 21milesinmalibu.com