Cybertruck Owner Drives Car Into Lake to Test ‘Wade Mode’, Gets Arrested

8 sources covered this compare →

Coverage of this incident varies significantly across outlets. The New York Post emphasizes the driver's perceived lack of intelligence, framing the event with a more critical tone, while Gizmodo uses a sarcastic approach to describe the…

Tom Hawking· May 20, 2026 · 3:50 PM UTC ·3 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 63 views

Cybertruck Owner Drives Car Into Lake to Test ‘Wade Mode’, Gets Arrested

#cybertruck #elon musk #arrest

TL;DR · WeSearch summary

A Tesla Cybertruck owner was arrested after driving the vehicle into Grapevine Lake to test its 'Wade Mode' feature. The incident occurred despite warnings in the vehicle's manual against such actions. The driver and passengers abandoned the vehicle, leading to the arrest and subsequent public outrage on social media.

Key facts

▪The driver attempted to test the Cybertruck's claim of being waterproof enough to serve as a boat.
▪Grapevine Police responded to the scene where the vehicle was stranded in the water.
▪The driver was arrested after abandoning the vehicle, which became disabled in the lake.

How this story was covered

8 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 30 hours. Coverage spans 3 points on the political spectrum — 1 lean left, 4 centre, 2 right.

Lean left · 1Centre · 4Right · 2

▪ Texas man arrested after allegedly driving Tesla Cybertruck into lake to test 'Wade Mode': police — Fox News
▪ Tesla Cybertruck driver arrested after driving into lake to use 'wade mode', police say — BBC News
▪ Tesla Cybertruck pulled from Texas lake after attempting ‘wade mode’ — The Guardian — World
▪ Texas man arrested after driving his Cybertruck into a lake to test its water mode — Quartz
▪ Someone drove a Tesla Cybertruck into a lake to test Wade Mode. It didnt end well. — Mashable
▪ Driver strands Cybertruck in Texas lake during botched attempt to activate ‘Wade Mode’: police — New York Post
▪ Tesla Cybertruck owner, intending to test "wade mode," learns about "sink mode" — Boing Boing

About this source

Gizmodo files mainly under tech. We currently carry 706 of its stories.

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Original article

Gizmodo · Tom Hawking

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Record

Original publisher	Gizmodo
Canonical URL	https://gizmodo.com/cybertruck-owner-drives-car-into-lake-to-test-wade-mode-gets-arrested-2000761357
Publication time	Wed, 20 May 2026 15:50:47 +0000
Retrieval time	2026-05-20T15:55:02.617Z
Last seen	2026-05-20T15:55:02.617Z
Headline source	Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite)
Excerpt source	publisher body
Excerpt method	First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited.
Summary	WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer)
Summary source text	contentText
Citation coverage	Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL.
Cluster	F21KAVQBCdZT · 8 stories
Cluster logic	Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison.
Ranking reason	Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking.
Publisher visit	Yes — open original
Substitutes article?	No — link-out required for full text

Rights status (four layers)

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No publisher-confirmed rights record for this source yet.

Machine-readable

No source-specific machine-readable restriction detected beyond the public feed.

WeSearch interpretation

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Unknown

Retrieval and training permissions are not asserted unless the publisher confirms them.

WeSearch handling by dimension

Indexing	May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)?	Allowed
Snippet	May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown?	Allowed
AI summary	May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article?	Limited
Retrieval / RAG	May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation?	Not asserted
Model training	May the content be used to train AI models?	Not asserted
Commercial reuse	May the content be reused commercially?	Not permitted

Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.

Open original publisher → Source rights JSON → Machine-readable provenance → Rights framework → WESEARCH-STORY-PROVENANCE-V1

Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand

Here’s a scene that has played out at some point in every primary school class across the world: A child does something obnoxious, dangerous, or just otherwise inexplicably dumb; After removing the coathanger from the power socket or whatever else, the flustered teacher demands to know why on earth the child did this thing; The child points at his neighbor, who is looking studiously out the window, and says, “He told me to”; The teacher sighs and says something like, “If he told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?” There are children who stare sheepishly at their shoelaces at this point and mumble, “No.” And then there are the ones who grow up to purchase a Tesla…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.

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