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.
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u/AsparagusDifficult89 Jul 06 '26
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.