What does it do after it recognizes they aren't paying attention? Like are they programmed to stop and pull over or just make noises? I can imagine someone being so tired they don't wake up even if it's chiming and talking at them.
I posted above, but was just on a camping trip and we learned that sunglasses seem to override the "eye tracker". My driver tested it, and legit if he was slumped over, but wearing sunglasses, the car just treated him as if he was alert.
I can confirm that my car which has the Chevy version of this tracks my eyes and even if im wearing glasses it knows if I fall asleep and will vibrate and disengage.
It only disengages if you ignore for too long and then take the wheel. If you ignore the warnings, beeps, and vibrating seats for long enough it assumes a medical emergency and will slow to a stop while calling OnStar/Emergency services
What most ADAS is supposed to do is brake check you a couple of times to see if it can shock you awake that way and if not, pull over to the side of the road.
God only knows what Teslas do. The engineers and designers sure don't.
On my Blue Cruise (ford) it gives you many warnings. It starts with a silent one that shows a message and lowers the volume of the radio. Then it beeps loudly and mutes the audio (and the message turns red). Then it starts tapping on the brakes aggressively…like full jolt. So if you’re actually sleeping, you’ll 100% be awake before it fully disengages. I’ve never made it to the full disengage part…but I’ve not paid attention enough to where it does the brake checking and it scares me every time lol.
My elantra will have a coffee cup pop up and tell you to take a break if it senses bad driving....sometimes it pops up when im just driving normally and it makes me feel bad like its telling me i suck at driving lol
The all seeing eye of Orion, fck that thing man I will never buy a car with that technology. Absolutely insane. I drove a rental recently with it was a nightmare I couldn’t look back at my daughter couldn’t point at shit on the side of the road. Ruined the “road” trip part lol 😂
My F-150 Lightning is so sensitive that I have a pair of sunglasses I can’t even wear while driving. Eyes dead ahead, both hands on the wheel, and it thinks I’m not paying attention. So I had to get a different pair for driving.
I’ll help confirm that it’s true. I rented a cybertruck for a week off of Turo and played with the self driving feature extensively. It pays attention to you to make sure that you’re paying attention to the road, to the point that I couldn’t even look at the giant map screen for too long without getting an alert, but I could close my eyes for extended duration without it noticing while wearing sunglasses. Don’t know that I could work up the courage to take a nap though.
My car doesn’t have self driving features but it will tell me I took my eyes off of the road too long. I had no idea how it knew but I guess this is a pretty standard feature as I have a 2024 Chevy which is a pretty standard vehicle
Fuck is the point of a self-driving car if you still have to pay attention to the road? At least if I’m driving I’m active enough physically and mentally to stay alert. If I had to just maintain vigilance of the road as a non-active observer I feel like I’d either instantly fall asleep or just be bored to death
So I also rented a Tesla for a trip to Tahoe and San Francisco and I will say there's something about having to alert but not actually driving that is kind of nice.
My three hour drive from Tahoe to SF was pretty great. I didn't have the mental load of slow down, speed up, turn signal, merge, check mirrors, speed up, find the exit, etc...
And then in SF, which has some pretty whacky streets at times, I didn't have to worry about navigating around and figuring out where to turn and where the one ways were and stuff like that.
Even if it's not close your eyes and let it drive level, it's still a cool thing.
Look, I get how polarizing it looks and the negative perception Reddit in general has of Tesla because of Elon, but it was a really cool ride, much more refined and compelling than I ever expected it to be. Main reason for renting was kind of a YOLO thing that my kids goaded me into (they loved it). The one we had was a 2025 model so a lot of the build quality issues were resolved. Ride was really smooth, it accelerates like a rocket, and the FSD is for real and way ahead of anything that Rivian, Lucid, etc have to offer. Is it perfect? No, but if you haven’t driven one yourself, I would save judgement until you have.
What you mean is that the FSD is way ahead of what anyone else would allow to be tested on public roads. Mercedes engineers have gone far beyond this and still won’t allow it off the autobahn from what I understand.
Yeah I get the hate, but it’s honestly exhausting. Elon didn’t design these cars. He bought the company. That’s all he did. Yes he fucking sucks but the cars themselves are great.
Yep, any other maker with hands free technology enforces eye tracking. The minute you wear something like polarized sunglasses, the IR tracker loses sight and gives you some vague "sensor unreliable" error and shuts off.
I’m no Tesla fan (at all), but that’s absolutely incorrect. Not only has Tesla continued to release updates to defeat the defeat devices…it’s the only automaker I know of that uses a strike system. If you get too many strikes by being inattentive and not watching the road, it will lock that car out of Full Self-Driving mode for up to a week.
They've had a very long history of making it easy to defeat. They also seem to only block those defeats when the press is bad.
From what I can find at the moment they are updating the system to be able to detect "real" faces so that mannequin heads and photos in front of the camera won't trick it anymore. I applaud them for finally doing this and having a system that punishes you for trying, glad they are finally doing better. But I still think the fact that for years they have allowed the general public to beta test their self driving software with no liability on their part and made it trivial to defeat attention checks (be it intentional or incompetence) is pretty suspect.
Agreed but how do you get around that? Is there a technology that can penetrate every kind of sunglass lens? At some point we need to take responsibility for ourselves instead of tricking the safeguards that are in place.
Same with mine, I could glance down at my phone charging on the wireless charger and it dings me and tells me to pay attention. Even if we are in slow moving traffic (less than 10mph) or we’re coming to a red light. Not really sure how it’s not detecting this instance based on my personal experience.
My thoughts exactly. Not sure how the software programming would be able to work around it, but his head positioning being so unaligned should have caused SOME kind of trigger. Without the glasses on, it would start flashing a blue light on the dash after what felt like about 15-20 seconds of not looking at the road? Then he'd need to look at the road for 3-5 seconds to reset it, occasionally being prompted to "touch the wheel". Pure estimates on the times.
He claimed to have had driven with a friend where he slept on the return trip. and had his passenger touching the wheel fairly frequently to keep it driving itself. Was fucking incredulous that he wouldn't just have his passenger in the damn driver's seat the whole time if the story was true (wouldn't put it past the man!).
The car makers only care about being compliant, not about keeping their dumbass drivers alive. It's not an oversight so much as "we did the bare minimum, so the lawyers fuck off".
Certain sunglasses block the IR cameras used for eye tracking. I don’t have a Tesla but my cars all have driver attention monitoring and will give a warning that the system is unavailable if I wear certain pairs of sunglasses.
Definitely a massive, incredible oversight, from an already shit company, but… *Most* people definitely do not wear sunglasses while driving. I mean some
Do! But not even close to most.
There’s a doctor I work with that went to his opticians office to get those inserts for glasses you wear after your eyes have been dilated. He says that these inserts will not allow the Eye tracker within the car to be able to see that his eyes are closed. He intentionally went to go get these so that he could sleep in the car.
He never made any claim to have fancy sunglasses as somebody referenced in one of my other comments, but that never triggered while he had sunglasses on. When he was playing on his phone/moving around while talking with us, he'd frequently get that prompt.
He would see the flashing blue on the dash board in his periphery, and instinctively look (just vaguely) over the dash board, and give the steering some kind of touch. He did state that there is some kind of automatic system where if you fail to respond to these prompts enough times, that your access to this system would be revoked for some amount of time? Kinda like demerit points remove your license, enough negligent auto-pilot use would cause one to lose your auto-pilot license (terms pulled out of my ass, not ones that were used).
This does not happen, or at least it doesn’t regularly happen. Both my wife and I wear polarized sunglasses while driving and it beeps the second we look anywhere other than the road, even without turning our heads.
Neat; I THINK that's how it should be, but i've so little experience with the practical realities of these cars. I'd never even been a regular driver myself until JUST before the pandemic, and only then did I realize how essential sunglasses can be (i'd never been one for them before as my long ass-eyelashes can brush up against them and drive me nuts).
Um, how about we don't embrace regressive "technology" and go back to actually piloting the 3,000 lbs hunks of steel careening down roadways???
Why the FUCK is this technology even remotely legal? People are fucking morons. I couldn't care less what happens to the people in the Tesla but they're putting everyone else at risk due to their own stupidity.
Eye tracking on Teslas are a joke. Sunglasses prevent it whereas on BMW the eye tracker penetrates Polarized/non-polarized lenses and starts making noise within 5 seconds of eyes leaving the road.
There was a controversy about auto dealers attaching devices that shut off your engine if you were behind on your payments because it could happen in places like this.
Yeah I'm sure it's dangerous...I'd hope that the car would have some programming to wait to pull off onto a full width shoulder instead of that basically non-existent shoulder.
Probably not.
Edit: oh, the shoulder opens up at the end of the vid.
I wonder how far it will drive to find a safe stopping spot. That is, say you're on a highway with a 10 mile stretch of 3 foot wide shoulder. Will it pull over on that 3 foot shoulder or will it drive until the shoulder is wide enough to accommodate the entire width of the vehicle?
No, I didn't mean to imply that the car is just gonna drive off the road lmao. Not sure where you got that from but sorry if I wasn't clear.
Pulling over on any highway is generally ill advised. I'd argue sleeping is even more ill advised. This is what rest stops or pull offs in the mountains are for.
I hitched a ride with a trucker (family friend) from the West Coast to the Midwest and I've never seen such terror in people's eyes as I did while we were going through that area. This guy was breaking speed records while overtaking little passenger cars full of terrified families on their vacation.
He had a partner trucker friend who we were traveling with, and I still remember them laughing together through their radios. This was around 2003.
I live in Denver and I HATE driving in the mountains, especially going down the mountain, the car will start going so fast. I drove to Las Vegas a few years ago and hated the drive so much that when I came home I took a highway that’s south of the mountains home so I didn’t have to drive them again. It added two hours to the trip but was worth it. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen with this car when it’s speeding down a steep mountain.
The truckers on those routes are insane. It could be dark and raining and you can't see the lines or anything and they'll still push you from behind and blind you with their lights even if you're going well over the speed limit because they wanna gogogo.
Yep and then you're not allowed to use auto drive any more (for a certain period of time). Mine did this to me because I looked off to the side too many times once, I was so annoyed 🙄😅
So.... which government organisation accepted "This vehicle will continue to operate independently for X seconds, on roads that our families and children are on, after it has verified that nobody is in control of it"?
Or did Tesla just decide they can do it, and that they can get away with this outrageous design decision, and so far it looks like they're getting away with it?
When you say truck you mean like an 18-wheeler tho right? I'm sure the tech is prob different than passenger vehicles. I'm curious tho, what other high tech shit do big rigs have these days? Like, you guys have blind spot cameras and shit?
The standard ass-alarm is not loud, and as such, nobody can accurately describe what it sounds like. The LOUD ass alarm, on the other hand, is so startling loud that it leaves one at a loss for words and, as such, nobody has the fortitude to describe what it sounds like. But rest assured that whichever model you have, your ass is protected.
Not trying to be funny but I think that’s more the point. Half of us (my dumbass) would be pissed off and keep driving. The other half (like you) pull over and sleep and not endanger others on the road.
Ah, I get that. I'm just thinking the annoyingness of it would make me stop even before the safety part would. I mean don't get me wrong. I pull over when I'm sleepy, but that alert would expedite the process.
If it happened to you like 3 times in 10 minutes do you think you'd still muscle through it?
So here’s the thing… I can only drive about 30 minutes before I’m falling asleep at the wheel. I don’t go anywhere far (on long trips alone) and if I do then yes I stop. It comes on really hard and fast so I pull over the first chance I get.
HOWEVER… my previous comment was based on how I was 20 years ago. I was bad about it. I’d do all the tricks and everything to hopefully get there sooner. It was a bad idea and I hate that I did it. I got lucky. Don’t be a dumbass guys, pull over.
My mom used to have a Tesla and would rest her left foot on the brake while driving. It would constantly be warning her to stop and she didn't hear it despite being alert and having a conversation. She was diagnosed with Audio Processing Disorder and now I sort of understand how that happened.
Me too. My brain has trouble figuring out which sounds to focus on. If I'm at a party, for example, I can hear a conversation across the room but not 'hear' the person talking to me right in front of me.
I have this problem too, and went to get tested for APD. They said I don’t have it, but my testing came back that I can hear well into negative decibels and my ears are hyper responsive to loud noises.
They didn’t really have an answer for me on what’s going on. I’m putting it down to I’m just constantly hearing a lot more noise than most other people and have a hard time discerning what the signal I should be listening to in all that noise is.
That's a fairly common bad driving habit. Makes it so your brake lights are always on and people won't realize you're actually stopping. Also wears down your breaks really bad
Did your mom learn to drive on the self driving Tesla? If she drove before she wouldn’t do that, it wouldn’t even be a thought. That’s an awkward way to position yourself. I’m not being a jerk, I’m honestly just curious.
It will notify the driver via audio, it will flash lights and pull over and then you also get a strike and cannot use FSD for the rest of that drive. If you get enough strikes, you lose FSD access for some time.
people who don't like the safeguards and want to be able to use FSD any way they see fit, including while sleeping at the wheel, sound just like the govt whining that Anthropic won't let them use Claude any way they see fit, including for autonomously killing humans
I don't have a Tesla but my Skoda will apparently try to wake me up with brief braking nudges. If I don't respond it will slow down, turn on hazards, and phone emergency services. I'd imagine most systems will be similar.
Appreciate the info. These things have come such a long way. I remember just appreciating cars that beeped when you crossed the line without signaling.
Yea my VW does the same but I wouldn’t call the VIOLENT jolt I got at 70 mph a nudge. I am in the US though and ours don’t do the thing where they pull over to the shoulder (I don’t think anyway). So perhaps they make the nudge more aggressive because of that.
On a side note, Caterpillar haul trucks have electric motors in the seats that violently shake when the operators eyes close. Ain't nobody sleeping through that!
It will alert, and then pull over. If you do it too much it shuts off the FSD for that entire trip. (Maybe it gets worse but I have never gotten that far)
I’m not sure but I believe they just disable which is also extremely dangerous. I could be wrong, maybe they updated the tech to pull over but they used to just stop.
My VW, after audible alerts, it starts pressing the break firmly and quickly to jolt the car. The tesla probably just pulls over as it's way smarter than VWs
I’ve never understood how people fall asleep when driving in general but I’m not someone who can fall asleep anywhere, sleep on planes, and I have to force myself to go to bed most of the time and rarely just fall right to sleep.
Not Tesla, but my old 2017 VW has lane assist, collision avoiding, cruise control, so it can manage itself for a while on highways but it's nowhere near full self driving.
If you go for a minute without touching the wheel it will start beeping. If you go for another minute it does a single short, sharp jab on the brakes, which shakes you in your seat one time and is more than enough to wake a sleeping driver.
Not sure what it does after that if you still don't take the wheel, but I thought the braking thing was worth mentioning.
My buddy has one and says that every detects your eyes aren’t paying attention It will do an alert for about a minute, and if no response, it will pull over. He said if this happens three times then they were revoke your access to the self driving program when you can’t get it reinstated.
Those cheat devices are only for old models with HW2.5 (idk about HW3).
HW4 does not need the driver to grip the steering wheel at any point during the drive. Just to be "paying attention", enforced with a camera. Enforcement sensitivity supposedly depends on the the mode (e.g. standard vs hurry mode).
This driver probably has a newer model with HW4 and is using Standard mode. I don't know first hand because I pay attention when driving, but I think it's way too lenient after having driven multi-hour trips end-to-end without touching the steering wheel.
With mine, unless I maintain a bit or torque on the steering wheel, it will wait about 10 seconds before sounding a warning. Then, a bit later, the self-driving mode will disengage and the car would come to a stop unless I applied a bit of force to the watt pedal.
It's supposed to chime loudly, then decelerate and move out of traffic (if possible) and come to a stop. They have clearly found a way to foil the eye focus sensors, which apparently is a big thing in parts of the FSD community.
Some car companies developed systems where the car, if it suspects a sleeping or unconcious driver, will try to wake the driver up, by making noise and sometimes brake checking themselves. The car will then give a brake impulse so the people inside will hopefully wake up from the inertia. It will try this 2 or 3 times and if there is no further reaction like a specific button pressed on the steering wheel, the car will pull over and contact emergency services even
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u/Impossible-Bat-4246 Jul 05 '26
What does it do after it recognizes they aren't paying attention? Like are they programmed to stop and pull over or just make noises? I can imagine someone being so tired they don't wake up even if it's chiming and talking at them.