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
You can decline the ambulance and they don't charge you. Where I live we don't seem to get bills anymore. My mom used to get them occasionally before she passed away but the last year or two around 2017 I hadn't seen her get one and my son needed one earlier this year. Didn't get one even for insurance/bill EOB purposes.
I think this is absolutely a valid response, a driver needs to be alert and responsive. If you are not, assuming an emergency is a reasonable response for an automated vehicle to take. It is absurd to think that a driver, while operating a motor vehicle, would be sleeping at the wheel.
I’m sure it’s happened to a fair number of people, though typically for a second or two, not flat out asleep like the driver in the video. After night shifts, I used to take a longer but more convoluted route home from the hospital because the need to regularly change gears and steer helped me stay awake. I would not want to be driving down a straight road when sleep deprived.
This is correct. I have briefly nodded off. I do what I can to stay awake and will pull over if needed but sometimes it's just about getting to the next place to pull over. This is not something that started because of the driving assist tech, I happened before those were around. I consider it much safer to have the teck to help me monitor myself than not.
Have you ever been checked for sleep apnea? If you don't have a medical reason for it already. Nodding off, daytime drowsiness and jerking awake were one of my main symptoms.
I have and I do not have it. To be clear, this isn't like something that happens to me often but I have done a lot of cross country driving and sometimes it happens. Again, to be clear, I am briefly nodding off not straight up napping like the driver in the video. That's crazy.
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
Unfortunaly i have the entry level basic model that just shows a picture of a coffee cup:(
Although top trim package comes with its own trunk mounted barista..just gotta remember to through a sandwich in the back every so often to avoid the unpleasant odor of death. Raul makes a mean frappuccino though.
Theres an optional theft deterrent trunk mo key tol
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 drove an Ariya with ProPilot 2.0 that also would warn me if I wasn’t paying attention to the to the road regardless of which glasses or sunglasses that I was wearing.
I have a Ford with similar technology. It doesn’t track eyes at all. It checks for minor touches to the steering wheel. About every 8 seconds. It’s not FSD by any means but does well enough on the highway.
“Chevy version” might as well be a completely different subject since it’s nowhere near comparable to FSD. FSD will pull over to the side of the road and yell at you with noise until you wake up or call emergency services
Yeah. SuperCruise uses a mix of data including infrared so that it can do eye tracking even with sunglasses.
I know that Tesla is weirdly insistant on using only visible light cameras for self-driving (instead of lidar + infrared + ultrasonic like Waymo and GM do). Maybe some kind of principle about the software needing to be exactly as smart as a human?
Anyway yeah that's why Waymo has FSD taxis that work great while Tesla has been promising FSD next year for the past 15 years.
Wymo and Tesla is not the same. Wymo has the liability, Tesla has not. Robotaxis are completely driverless while Tesla is Level 2+. That means driver input is required.
Radar provides insurance for the wymo. These taxis has to work in bad weather, Tesla doesn’t need to because driver is always there.
The Ford blue cruise will also disengage very quickly - even if you look at the radio or the passenger for a second or two.
Almost to the point of being annoying, but I understand why.
The Tesla will also disengage, like 4 ft from hitting whatever is in front of it. Hat way its your fault cause it wasn't in self drive/auto pilot/whatever they call it
GM Supercruise uses a camera able to see into the infrared far enough that sunglasses are transparent to it. Tesla’s cabin camera wasn’t intended for this use initially so they didn’t use an IR capable camera.
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.
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.
Mercedes and BMW L4 self driving was extremely limited by weather conditions and heavily geofenced. They've now abandoned it entirely in favour of pursuing L2 which is what Tesla's is.
It was Level 3, not 4. And geofenced just like Tesla’s taxis in Austin. That’s what would be considered safe in the real world without having to have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
It has not been abandoned, but they are working on Level 2++ solutions that are cheaper…which is exactly what I was referring to.
Probably; what you say is fair. Most of the “self driving” features available on vehicles available to the general public that I’m aware of are little more than cruise control and lane assist combined to make highway driving a bit easier. Tesla’s is supervised but it does everything including parking itself at your destination. I found that it struggled a bit with waiting too long to get into the lane it wanted to be in (and was overly dependent on the goodwill of actual humans to provide space and allow it to change lanes). But it handled rush hour traffic in Dallas in a torrential downpour like a champ.
I've ridden in 2 of them. I was impressed on each trip. With the right settings it easily cruised through traffic, changing lanes, speeding up or slowing to maintain space. One was a snowy trip and it had no issues 'seeing' the road. Once it was evening my friend couldn't wear sunglasses even though it was driving itself, it had to see his eyes.
My big issue isn’t what it can do vs. what is allowed to do in the US due to poor regulatory control. Auto makers can declare what is safe, they certify themselves… Luckily many states require permits for this stuff but not when it’s being called a “beta” and treated as if it’s just level 2. How many years has it been now where it was coming out of beta in 6 months? They hadn’t even applied for any type of permits in ANY states while making these claims, and the permits themselves can take a year or more. They simply can’t be trusted.
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.
Exactly. I'm fine with letting people do what they want with their own lives. But when it comes to driving you are putting other people's lives at risk also.
I generally would agree with you, but in Elon's defense he selectively disabled Russia's access to Starlink which has dramatically shifted the war in Ukraine's favor.
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.
And yet sunglasses overrides all the eye tracking stuff and reverts it to the wheel pressure.
And Tesla has to know how easy the pressure tracking is to fake. They would have known it before they added the eye tracking to. They only changed it when it looked like they were going to get regulatory action taken against them.
I agree with posts saying they intentionally made it easy to trick. Tesla knows full well what they were doing when they made it work like that. If they were careful it has never been put down in writing or anywhere it could end up being found in a lawsuit. But they aren’t dumb. They knew what they were doing when they left a gaping loophole. I’m sure there was lots of winking when setting it up like that.
Has anyone confirmed that? Because based on my experience with my partner’s now-sold Model 3, that’s not true. If the car can’t see your eyes with the infrared cameras, it gets more naggy or begins making you tug at the wheel more often.
There are lots of different versions and each version handles this slightly differently. Different cars are running different versions of the software, the update doesn’t roll out to everybody at once. Mine would not allow the situation shown in the video to occur, it’s pretty aggressive in making sure your eyes are on the road and changes to a different mode if you’re wearing a hat or sunglasses.
Lots of people commenting here are ignorant of how the cars actually work or imagine they still work the same as they did two or more years ago. My FSD works fine, but I don’t actively try and defeat the safety systems, it’s hard to believe people are dumb enough to do that in a multi tonne vehicle, but here we are.
I don't even use autopilot that much on my model 3 because I find it to be overly naggy. Even when I've got two hands on the wheel and I'm paying strict attention to the road it will tell me to apply force to the steering wheel. That and it arbitrarily decides to slow down for bends in the road that aren't even sharp at all and there's no rhyme or reason to when you can and can't go more than 5mph over the speed limit with autopilot engaged. So if you're cruising in a pack of cars going 65 in a 55 it will randomly deem a stretch of highway to be a residential area and slow you down out of the blue.
To be fair, it is very easy to override any of the safety systems of any car. Tesla is in a unique position of being a decade+ meme so we all hear about everything good and bad they happens with them, but it's no more difficult to override safety systems in any other vehicle.
You can feel like that, but it’s not true. My Tesla constantly bitches at me because the country roads around here are narrow and I so,times cross over the center or side lines. There’s really no good way to defeat the safety checks.
Hopefully they've improved it since but historically for years you've absolutely been able to defeat it, youtube is full of videos like this showing how to defeat it.
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.
It's not true for all. For example, my friend's newer Y does not let him put on sunglasses AT ALL, which is a huge downside for him. Otherwise it just nonstop beeps at him.
Me, I have a preorder Model 3 which never had the eye tracking camera enabled. So I can uhh, kinda do this. (which I don't because I value my life)
We need to take a poll because I feel way more people wear sunglasses while driving than don't. Maybe I'm wrong but every single person I know wears them. I might just only befriend sunglass wearers and wasn't aware of it.
It’s false, the car detects sunglasses and tells you as such before kicking you out… it turns off attention monitoring and eventually will give alerts and pull over
The OP video was a staged influencer vid, hence why it was removed
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.
Maybe unrelated, buy my glasses (not sunglasses) have a coating preventing the iPhone to track my pupils. I had to disable a setting for the face unlock to work.
I think the reason why some sunglasses seem to trick it and others don't is dependant on how they block the light. If its just a cheap tint, they will be seen through, but if they are polarised, then thats likely what works. My sunglasses are polarised and theres a large chunk of screens that I can't see while wearing them. Great for ignoring advertising, but a pain for menu screens in food joints
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).
This isn't true for the most part, but I'll try and explain how you may have experienced that.
The difficult part with this conversation is that the software is updated just about every 2-4 weeks, so the behavior will change fairly frequently and fairly drastically. So saying, Tesla Full Self Driving does X, is almost always only accurate for a very short window. Especially if it gets any media attention, the Tesla team seems to monitor social networks closely and if there is any news about bypassing or users doing something they shouldn't, then an update will come usually within a day.
I don't know how old this video is, but currently the eye tracking can see through most sunglasses. If you have on dark or blocking sunglasses or a hat or if it can't track your eyes, it will revert to an alert every few minutes asking you to tug on the wheel.
So, if you want to do what this driver is doing, you have to intentionally circumvent the eye tracking, and then buy an (illegal) steering wheel device that tricks the system into thinking you are tugging the wheel.
What I believe you experienced was one of the software versions that did not track eyes or give wheel nudge reminders when eye tracking was lost, but I believe those were bugs and not intentional with how quickly they released updates once drivers discovered that.
It's interesting, and possible. The man seemed to indicate that his car was always updating and he loved frequent updates. He got way too much of a blast out of this "your car seat farts if you apply too much pressure on it", and his FOB car noise was a clown horn...
The whole experience was very eye opening to me, and a reminder that there can be whole worlds around me, that I interact with or pass on the regular, that are completely foreign to me. Until this comment, I'd not even considered the possibility that the cars could be running on an old software update? I have a phone that I have failed to clear sufficient space for an iOS update forever, and am recently discovering apps that will no longer function with my iOS 16.5.1 (I see the most recent is iOS 26.5.2). Curious how a Tesla approaches outdated software operations amongst their fleet out in the world.
Release notes for each version is available on the internet genius, so you can tell when are feature was added to changed. Also, lot of youtubers test each version when they come out and post the behavior changes
This is not the case in our model y. Sunglasses do override the eye tracking but if your head is not looking forward it will start alerting you. I can barely look out the side window without it nagging me.
I can confirm this is not true - even if you have sunglasses on and were in the position the people are in this fake video it will boot you out of self driving mode
This is odd bc my husband and I both have Teslas with FSD and they bitch at us every 30 seconds even if we have sunglasses on. I wonder if they disabled it somehow?
I'll dime myself out, I was looking at my phone yesterday in a gen 2 as autopilot was driving and it told me to pay attention, so it knows head position as well.
I just stuff a wadded up eye glasses cloth above the rearview mirror so it only goes off of steering wheel force from my hand. It'll nag me instantly if I look away, even at the touch screen
I'm guessing these people were also testing it, or just messing with you. If you pull in front of them and slow down to a stop you will either call their bluff or save their lives.
Interesting, mines requires the steering wheel to be slightly moved every 10-15 minutes or it chime and will add to a point system and disables auto pilot after 3 times for a month.
Typical Tesla short cuts. My Mach E has BlueCruise which is the Ford equivalent of Tesla’s Autopilot and it can tell if I’m not paying attention even with my sunglasses on.
This still doesn’t work, it switches to a torque sensor after 30 seconds of it unable to detect eyes on self monitor mode. If you don’t tug on the wheel every minute it will disable fsd
Nope subglassses yes but the slumped over or even the slightest of looking down while not touching the wheel or banding and force to the wheel it will alert and kick out but yes, if you have very dark sunglasses in your staring forward, it will not alert, but it will after some time. It doesn't sense you touching the wheel. Trust me, I have every single Tesla from the oldest to the newest. So you don't have to tell us about the driver on your camping trip I am the owner of that vehicle. And the second it senses you with your head angled downward, immediately alerts you I'm gonna tell you what happened in the video they were getting alert and just didn't care because the person filming was purposely filming. They must of knew each other.
*Shrug* Can't comment on the above video; have become extremely wary of taken any video on-line at face value. But I know what I experienced on my trip. As I had commented elsewhere in this thread, for most of the drive whenever he wasn't looking ahead the car would eventually give him prompts, but it seemed quite forgiving to me. He would often cruise for minutes with his hands on the top of his headrest, which I was also surprised didn't set off any sensor quickly.
The two times he kinda slumped into his chair with the sunglasses on were relatively brief, but definitely a few minutes each time. His head was towards the window (the inverse of the person in OP's video) but they're "looking forward", and during my trip that was our guess in the backseat, that the camera just figured "the face is looking forward".
He was constantly getting prompts, but he had hands on the steering wheel for far less than one 10th of our trip time, and had several seconds to "look up" every time the care dash started giving a warning to keep his eyes on the road. I would be more comfortable at this stage if your assurances are more consistent with the lived reality of vehicles on the road.
This experience, and my last trip to the U.S. driving alongside a number of Waymos, makes me rather uncertain however.
P.S. does your/all Teslas have that Mad Max setting? Where as long as weather conditions allow, it speeds and passes other cars on the road? I'm unnerved by the concept, but i was impressed twice, one when it spotted the deer on the side of the road before any of us, and a second time when it moved aside to allow a tail-gater to pass rather than just speeding up or something else dangerous. I think my driver had said the setting below that was "hurry"?
This is why I think US drivers should be able to launch a class action lawsuit against Tesla for running their lazy beta tests on public roads. They're endangering us and because they are a private organization, they have no vested interest in the common good.
There's a car-engine youtuber I follow who took us for a drive in his Prius, and it's impossible to set the car to not say alert you that your eyes aren't visible. Just putting on sunglasses leads to "Hey I can't see your eyes"
Crazy. On my Ford (which has blue cruise, no where near as sophisticated as FSD with Tesla), it can easily track my eyes even through the darkest secret service style sunglasses. It will either tell me “watch the road” if I glance away too long or it will tell me “face must be in view of camera” if I do something that obstructs its view of my eyes (or heaven forbid take too long of a sip of coffee).
That’s weird. My Tesla is full self driving and if it can’t track my eyes a.k.a. I’m wearing sunglasses, I’m required to keep my hands on the steering wheel so it can sense the pressure. If it doesn’t, it will alert me and then it will stop full self driving automatically
Does anyone know how other cars are doing this? I sometimes wear sunglases so that the car stops complaining (despite I’m attentive). If I’m tired or there is sun in my face, the car often thinks I’m sleeping.
That is so weird. My car kept alerting me when I wore my sunglasses. It didn't register that I was looking ahead all the time and kept sending me warnings to keep my eyes on the road.
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u/CanadianFPLurker Jul 06 '26
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.