You may have seen it doing the rounds: a video of a Tesla Optimus robot sitting behind the wheel of a car, on a road presented as Korean. The short, clear answer: there is no robot in that video. It is a South Korean Tesla fan in an Optimus costume. The fact-check by Fact Crescendo, published on 14 August 2026, already dealt with the circulation of this footage and settled it in a word: false. That did not stop it taking off again five days later.

And the best part is that nobody lied in the first place.

Where does this video come from?

The original footage dates from 28 February 2026. It was posted on X by the account @emzipori2, with a Korean caption that openly owns up to the joke. It reads: "Tesla’s Optimus robot learning to drive on Korean roads! You could call that a real robotaxi, couldn’t you?", the whole thing punctuated with laughing emojis. In Tesla’s vocabulary, the robotaxi is the driverless car — more on that below. It was a gag, and signposted as one.

On 19 August 2026, another account, @HumanSapiensX — just over three hundred followers — reposted the video. Without the caption. Without the emojis. Without the joke. And there, according to the count recorded by El País on 19 August, the repost came close to 200,000 views, while the original post, the one that was laughing, topped out at 103,800 views.

That is the real mechanism, and it holds for plenty of other subjects: the hoax is not the problem. The repost that strips out the joke is.

The three details that gave the costume away

The most useful thing in this story is not the verdict, it is how you get there. Here are the clues noted by El País on 24 August 2026 — and you can run the same check on any video of the same kind.

  • The height. The official specifications for Tesla’s Optimus give 1.73 metres and 57 kilogrammes. The figure filmed looked taller and bulkier.
  • The gaze. The figure stared at the camera at times. Reading that as a very human reflex is our take: a machine busy with its task has no reason to do it.
  • The ease. The supposed robot was driving with an ease that Optimus has never demonstrated publicly, writes El País.

Three details, three simple questions: does the figure match the official dimensions? Does the machine behave like a machine? And above all: has it ever done this in public, anywhere other than in that one video?

Robotaxi and Optimus are not the same thing

To our mind, it is that confusion which made the video credible. At Tesla, these are two separate programmes. In the company’s nomenclature, the robotaxi refers to a car running on the Full Self-Driving system, presented as having no human driver — that is the in-house classification, not autonomy verified by a third party. Optimus, meanwhile, is filed under "bots", the mobile physical robots. And no public Tesla document describes an Optimus driving a car on the open road.

Put another way: a car that is supposed to drive itself has no need whatsoever for a humanoid to be installed behind the wheel. The two ideas resemble each other in the popular imagination; they meet nowhere in the company’s documents.

Where does Optimus really stand?

Here too, there is something solid to report. According to a Tesla regulatory filing dated January 2026 and cited by the fact-checkers, Optimus Gen 3 is the first version designed for mass production. Preparation of the first manufacturing line was under way at the time, and the start of production was announced for before the end of 2026.

That is the documented state of play, as of January 2026: an assembly line being set up, not a robot sitting its driving test.

Our obsession, and why it matters here

Normally, when we watch a robot demonstration, our vigilance focuses on one specific point: is the machine deciding, or is a human operator piloting it remotely? That is what we call teleoperation, and it is the first thing we try to establish here. A teleoperated robot is not an autonomous robot, however spectacular the video.

This time, the trick went even further: there was neither an autonomous robot nor a teleoperated one. There was no robot at all. Just a fan, a costume, and a good joke that lost its caption along the way.

The method, worth keeping handy

Three reflexes, and they can all be done from your phone. One: trace it back to the original post, because that is often where the key lies — here, a mocking caption and laughing emojis. Two: compare what you are seeing with the model’s official specifications, starting with height and weight. Three: ask yourself whether the machine has ever shown this behaviour anywhere else, in front of witnesses.

If the answer is no, the video is not proof. It is just a video. And sometimes, as here, it is even very funny — provided you watch it with its original caption.