A video featuring a woman attempting to refuel her Tesla at a gas station became a viral sensation earlier this month. The incident involved a social media influencer who admitted to forgetting that her car runs on electricity, not gas.
Danielle Wright, the influencer, stated in an interview with the Daily Star, “I honestly don’t know what I was doing. It was the end of a long day, and the car is brand new. I just rolled up into the petrol station thinking about the sweets I was going to get from the counter rather than the fact my car doesn’t actually need petrol.”
The video even caught the attention of Elon Musk, who responded to the incident on Twitter by saying, “Happens from time to time. Habits die hard.”
The footage shows Wright driving up to a gas station and searching for a suitable spot to insert the fuel nozzle. At one point, she even attempts to insert the fuel line into the Tesla’s charging port. Throughout the incident, two men filming from a vehicle behind her mock Wright, eventually advising her to stop attempting to fuel her car with gasoline.
While certain hybrid vehicles can accommodate both gas and electric charging, introducing gasoline into the charging port of a traditional electric car can be detrimental. The US Environmental Protection Agency warns that gasoline can cause fires in an electric vehicle.
Several users of the millions of viewers that watched the video stated that the video was fake and looked staged while also attracting a lot of negative comments.
Wright informed the Daily Star that she received “thousands of messages” regarding the video but admitted that negative feedback is nothing new to her, given her career as an adult content creator. She stated, “I’m so used to being called fake. Fake boobs, fake this, fake that. People online can say what they want, but it was an embarrassing mistake.”