It was on paw-topilot.

A viral video of a motorist encountering a pooch driving a Tesla down the freeway has been revealed to be a doggone con.

Austin, Texas, influencer Blake Missick recently copped to staging the fast and furr-ious stunt, but only after it fooled oodles of people on social media and in the news.

“I set out to create the perfect viral video,” explained the trickster, who frequently posts ludicrous videos for his 685,500 TikTok followers, in a recent video.

For the uninitiated, the original viral clip, captioned “this dude cruising down the road,” shows a shaggy lapdog barreling down the road by itself in what appears to be a 2017 Tesla Model X. If the situation wasn’t hairy enough, the ruff rider doesn’t appear to be strapped in despite the fact that the window is wide open.

“This is crazy, there’s nobody in there!” the videographer can be heard exclaiming in the background. “Is this legal?”

Needless to say, the clip quickly took the internet by storm, amassing over 10 million views on Reddit and getting shared by news outlets from Jalopnik to Inside Edition, many of whom wondered if Missick’s incredible sighting was, in fact, for real. The huckster even did an interview with Inside Edition, in which he claimed that he’d happened upon the surreal scene while driving with a friend.

Low and behold, in a follow-up video posted to TikTok, Missick admitted to orchestrating the whole thing. This went against the provocateur’s prior claims to Inside Edition that he had nothing to do with the paw-tomobile stunt, and that it was likely his fellow influencer pals punking him.

“It all started a couple months ago, when an ad agency told me I couldn’t afford a video that would generate a couple million views,” the TikTok troll explained of his inspiration. “That made me mad but what really set me off was when a guy named @toetickler37 messaged me saying ‘your videos suck.'”

Using these motivations, Missick reportedly “paid for a consultation with a Hollywood stunt coordinator, rented a Tesla and got my roommate and his dog.” He then went out to a private road and shot the stunt until it was “perfect,” he said.

Missick didn’t go into detail on how exactly he pulled off the driving dog effect; however, viewers have deduced that he’d monkeyed with the electric vehicle’s autopilot feature. While the “self-driving software” requires that the driver has their hands on the steering wheel at all times, it is apparently easily tricked into thinking there’s a human behind the wheel, Futurism reported.

The explainer clip concludes with Missick celebrating pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes — despite the fact that the “perfect viral video” gag apparently only gained him a piddling six Youtube subscribers.

“Take that @toetickler37,” the jokester snarked in the clip.

Austin Police Department’s Animal Cruelty Unit is currently investigating the outlandish stunt.

This isn’t the first time an opportunistic videographer has abused Tesla’s self-driving software.

In 2018, a British man was temporarily banned from driving after turning on Tesla’s autopilot and moving into the passenger seat while the car was cruising down a highway.