The inside of a Tesla vehicle as it sits parked in a new showroom and service center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on July 5, 2016, in New York.

Jesse Lyu trusts his Tesla’s “self-driving” technology; he’s taken it to work, and he’s gone on 45-minute drives without ever needing to intervene. He’s a “happy customer,” he told SFGATE. But on Thursday, his Tesla scared him, badly.

Lyu, the founder and CEO of artificial intelligence gadget startup Rabbit, was on the 15-minute drive from his apartment to his office in downtown Santa Monica. He’d turned on his car’s self-driving features, called Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), after pulling out of his parking garage. The pay-to-add features are meant to drive the Tesla with “minimal driver intervention,” steering, stopping and accelerating on highways and even in city traffic, according to Tesla’s website. Lyu was cruising along, resting his arms on the steering wheel but letting the car direct itself, he said in a video interview Friday.

Then, Lyu’s day took a turn for the worse. At a stoplight, his Tesla turned left onto Colorado Avenue, but it missed the lane for cars. Instead, it plunged onto a street-grade light rail track between the road’s vehicle traffic lanes, paved but meant solely for trains on LA’s Metro E Line. He couldn’t just move over — a low concrete barrier separates the lanes, and a fence stands on the other side.

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