Texas Cybertruck Driver Arrested After Wade Mode Lake Test Sinks Truck

Jimmy Jack McDaniel rolled his Tesla Cybertruck down a public boat ramp at Grapevine Lake on Monday evening, switched on Wade Mode, and drove into the water with passengers aboard. By 8 p.m. the truck was disabled, the Grapevine Fire Department’s water rescue team was on scene, and the 70-year-old driver was on his way to jail.

He told police he had done it before, including in the Atlantic Ocean. This time the lake bed kept the truck and the booking sheet ran three charges long.

The Boat Ramp Arrest at Katie’s Woods

Officers from the Grapevine Police Department arrived at Katie’s Woods Park Boat Ramp around 7:50 p.m. on May 18, roughly 25 miles north of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. They found a Cybertruck near the shoreline, taking on water, with the driver and passengers already out of the vehicle. The rescue team waded in to drag it back onto concrete.

McDaniel told officers he had driven into the lake intentionally to test Wade Mode while his guests, a pair of visitors from Germany, rode along. He volunteered that this was not his first attempt; he had taken the truck through water several times before, including in the Atlantic Ocean, without incident. The lake bed at Grapevine, shallower than open coastline but littered with debris, apparently disagreed.

We wouldn’t encourage willingly driving your vehicle into the water. We don’t encourage your cars going into the water.

That line came from Officer Katharina Gamboa, speaking to CBS Texas after the rescue. McDaniel was held at the Grapevine Jail through Tuesday afternoon while the booking worked its way through the system.

Wade Mode by the Owner’s Manual

Tesla’s official Cybertruck owner’s manual describes Wade Mode as a feature that “allows Cybertruck to enter and drive through bodies of water, such as rivers or creeks.” It raises the air suspension to Very High, pressurises the high-voltage battery pack against ingress, and caps suggested travel speed at 1 to 3 mph. The hard ceiling is 32 inches (815 mm) of water measured from the bottom of the tire.

To engage it, owners close every door and window, drop below 20 mph, open the Off-Road App, and tap Wade. The manual then puts the responsibility back on the driver in plain English: “It is your responsibility to gauge the depth of any body of water before entering. Damage or water ingress to Cybertruck as a result of driving in water is not covered by the warranty.”

The gap between what the manual permits and what Elon Musk has publicly promised the truck can do is the entire story of this arrest.

Musk’s Boat Promise and the Mod Package That Never Shipped

In September 2022, Musk posted on X that the Cybertruck “will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes & even seas that aren’t too choppy.” He followed it with a more specific claim about needing the truck to cross the channel between Starbase and South Padre Island, a stretch of brackish water roughly 360 meters wide.

In December 2023, with the truck heading toward customer deliveries, he doubled down. Tesla, he said, would offer a mod package allowing the Cybertruck to traverse at least 100 meters of water as a boat, requiring “mostly just” cabin door seal upgrades. That mod package has never appeared in the configurator. It is not listed in the accessories catalog. Owners who pre-ordered the truck on the strength of that promise have, instead, a 32-inch wade limit and a warranty disclaimer.

McDaniel did not invent the idea that his Cybertruck could handle a Texas lake. The chief executive of the company that sold it to him spent two years telling the internet exactly that.

A Pattern Building Since Ventura Harbor

The Grapevine booking is the fourth high-profile Cybertruck water incident on record, and the second to involve Wade Mode being used as the marketing material suggested rather than the manual’s terms.

1. Ventura Harbor, California, March 2025. A driver attempting to launch a jet ski put the truck in reverse instead of forward and rolled it off the ramp. The Ventura City Fire Department, Vessel Assist, Tow Boat US, Harbor Patrol and the Coast Guard worked together to recover the fully submerged Cybertruck from the harbor floor.
2. Truckee, California, 2025. An owner activated Wade Mode in a body of water and could not get out, prompting California Highway Patrol officers to quip publicly that “Wade Mode isn’t Submarine Mode.”
3. Slovakia, 2025. A European owner tested Wade Mode in a lake and got stuck, requiring local recovery services.
4. Grapevine Lake, Texas, May 18, 2026. McDaniel drove down the closed boat ramp and onto the lake bed, with two German visitors in the cabin, on the assumption the truck could handle it because the previous attempts in shallower water had worked.

Four incidents in roughly 14 months is no longer an outlier curve. It is a behaviour pattern around a feature whose marketing and manual point in different directions, and the legal and recovery costs are landing on the public agencies that pull the trucks back out.

The Warranty Carve-Out Owners Skim Past

Tesla’s published warranty is unambiguous on what happens when a Cybertruck takes on water. The high-voltage battery pack pressurises during Wade Mode to slow ingress, but the standard battery warranty excludes damage from collision, water intrusion, vandalism and neglect. Submersion sits squarely inside that exclusion.

Owners who get into trouble in water generally have three financial doors open to them, and none of them are factory-funded:

• Comprehensive auto insurance typically covers flood and submersion damage, treating the vehicle as a total loss when water reaches drivetrain electronics. Insurers want a clear waterline mark on interior panels as proof.
• Off-road exclusion language in the Cybertruck warranty also strips coverage when the truck is driven “over uneven, rough or damaged roads,” which has been read broadly enough that owners have lost claims over potholes. A boat ramp run is well past that line.
• Personal liability exposure expands fast once a vehicle enters a restricted waterway with passengers, especially passengers from outside the United States who would have grounds to pursue civil action if they were injured.

For a Cybertruck owner, the price of treating Wade Mode as a swim option is paid first by the insurance carrier, then by the legal calendar.

The Charges After the Water Rescue

Texas does not have a specific “do not drive your truck into a lake” statute. It does not need one. Grapevine police booked McDaniel on three counts that read like a checklist of what a passenger vehicle on a closed boat ramp violates by default.

The charges are operation of a motor vehicle in a closed section of a park or lake, no valid boat registration on file (because the truck was, for the moment, operating as a vessel) and multiple water safety equipment violations covering the absence of life jackets, navigation lights and other required gear. None of the three charges rest on Wade Mode being engaged or on Tesla’s marketing language. They rest on physical presence in a restricted waterway with a vehicle that was neither permitted nor equipped to be there.

That distinction matters for any owner watching the case. The Cybertruck did not get McDaniel arrested. The boat ramp did. The truck simply added the public spectacle and the recovery bill.

McDaniel remained in the Grapevine Jail through Tuesday afternoon as the local court processed his case. The Cybertruck, hauled out of Katie’s Woods by the rescue team that should not have had to wade into a lake for an electric pickup, will likely be totalled by an insurer whose policy never anticipated a customer would test the boat claims in person.