- Drivers in China have found a clever way to defeat Tesla’s driver monitoring system.
- The workaround involves a doll head glued to a suction cup.
- It tricks the system into thinking that they are paying attention to the road and effectively disables the monitoring nags.
Some Tesla owners have found a new way to fool their cars into thinking that their eyes are on the road. The method? Using a doll head affixed in front of their mirror.
Wired reports that Chinese eCommerce sites have started to sell “travel companions” marketed specifically for Tesla owners. The companions are actually ping pong ball-sized doll heads, some even resembling celebrities like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The idea is to stick them directly in front of the car’s cabin-facing camera.
But these companions have an ulterior motive. They’re used to trick Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving into thinking that the car has the most attentive driver on earth behind the wheel.
See, the features—both of which are classified as Level 2 driver assistance systems—require that drivers pay attention to the road. If the driver appears to be looking at a phone, a passenger, or even the car’s infotainment screen, the system will alert the driver to pay attention. Tesla measures driver attentiveness by watching the position of the driver’s head and eyes, which means that a carefully-positioned doll’s head is enough to trick the car into thinking that the driver is looking straight ahead at the road.
One driver told Wired that he used the doll head method for 250 miles of a 400-mile trip. This allowed him to go 30 minutes without being interrupted, all while eating sunflower seeds with one hand, and filming the interaction with the other.
This isn’t the only way folks are fooling FSD. This has been a years-long game of cat and mouse. Some drivers tried using photos to trick the system after the camera-based monitoring system was first rolled out. There are other contraptions (and more doll heads) that people have worked up to trick the system. Back when Tesla gauged attentiveness by measuring torque on the steering wheel, some drivers affixed special weights to one side of the steering wheel so they could go hands-free. Wired reports that some drivers are going above and beyond by using lenticular prints and small screens as well.
The reality is, driver monitoring requires careful tuning to ensure that you have an appropriate level of false-positives and safety. If it’s too noisy, people just won’t use the feature, but make it too lax and it’s easily defeated. And if an automaker patches the hole, determined drivers will look for another one. That’s a problem when drivers defeat the system and then go on to do things like watch videos and goof off on their phones while they should be paying attention to the 4,000-pound machine that they’re supposed to be operating.
Obviously, Tesla’s ultimate goal is to remove the need for driver monitoring altogether by having the cars drive themselves. But for now it still needs to deal with the reality that a human is behind the wheel—or, in this case, a plastic approximation of one.