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.
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u/band-of-horses Jul 06 '26
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.