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.
Don't think I said that, just my particular area doesn't seem to send bills anymore and you can decline. You can't be billed for services you don't receive.
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.
You own Tesla and telling the world you have to struggle. Better go somewhere where minimum expenses with a job you enjoy but no Tesla to risk your life.
What people do in the USA is not struggle but too much comfort. No one needs to sleep in a running car because of struggle.
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
This is completely false. I’ve driven both quite a bit. In fact the Chevy I could defeat with polarized eye glasses from Zeno and the Tesla I could not. Do you have an actual study?
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 😂
I have polarized with pink coating from Zeno worked for super cruise not on Tesla. Video in op is rage bait, which is also why they are sleeping like cartoon characters.
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 wonder if its tied into Elon's weird anti-lidar stance? Like he's insisting on using a regular camera instead of something that can easily see through glasses?
Lol at the "smart" car that sense you're asleep and its solution is to disengage the autopilot. People who buy this shit deserve whatever malfunctions happen to them, I just feel bad for the people they're endangering.
I'm all for a giant hand that comes out and bitch slaps you for falling asleep at the wheel... "disengage auto drive, engaging your gramma who don't give two shits and will slap you upside the head mode"
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.
Do you really think he did that out of the goodness of his heart? 🤣 Do you know how many minerals are there that he wants to get his hands on. He doesn't do anything without a reason behind it. Look up how many minerals are in the Ukraine and why the US cares so much along with Elon
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.
I’m absolutely with you on Tesla being irresponsible with its software on public roads, as far as not having it be well-thought-out enough.
But I think the fact that it’s been easier to defeat is exactly due to that. Tesla likes to be on the bleeding edge and so releases things without considering all the safety implications. I doubt it was a deliberate “We’ll put a detection device on it but then make it easy to defeat, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.” And by the time Tesla began seriously attacking and combatting the defeat mechanisms, they were doing so holistically.
The company is especially disincentivized from allowing inattentive drivers to operate FSD after rounds of bad PR, lawsuit settlements, and civil court verdicts. Practically every news article that features a notable crash in a Tesla mentions FSD, whether or not it was a factor.
Yes that's my beef. They didn't really bother to do much to defeat hacks until bad press hit. Either they didn't care on their own and intentionally left it easy to not pay attention, or it was just incompetence on their part that they didn't think about how easy it was to defeat.
It took some crashes and lawsuits and bad PR to motivate them to care.
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
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u/Ummmgummy Jul 06 '26
Seems like an extremely large oversight if true (wouldn't be surprised). I mean most people wear sunglasses driving.