Tesla recently introduced its Full-Self Driving (Supervised) system in China. The system must ensure that drivers keep their eyes on the road while using Autopilot.
However, some Tesla owners in China have come up with a solution using miniature plastic doll heads that trick Tesla’s driver monitoring system into thinking they are actually paying attention to the road.
For anywhere from $10 to $40, a Tesla driver can use one these plastic doll heads – celebrities love Christiano RonaldoLionel Messi and The Rock are among the most popular – to trick Tesla’s in-cab camera, allowing them to look away from the road, look at their phones and even sleep.
Tesla uses a small camera above the rearview mirror, unlike most automakers, which mount driver monitoring devices on the A-pillar or behind the steering wheel. However, Chinese Tesla owners have discovered that they can trick the camera into mistaking the miniature plastic doll head for a real human head when placed in front of it.
According to Wired, Tesla owners place these heads on the car’s ceiling, windshield, or rearview mirror to obstruct the driver’s head.
Tesla owners have found other solutions for the driver monitoring system
Tiny doll heads aren’t the only way Chinese Tesla drivers fool the driver monitoring system. Some owners place photos in front of the camera or use lenticular images that appear to flash when viewed from different angles. Others use small display panels that play continuous movies of a person’s face blinking and moving naturally to undermine Tesla’s protections.
One driver told me Wired he used a small replica of The Rock went on a road trip and said he could go for 30 minutes without interruptions. In a video of the trip, he used one hand to snack on sunflower seeds and the other to film.
“You should buy a toy head the size of a ping pong ball,” the driver said on a Chinese video platform where Tesla drivers shared tips with each other. “If it’s too small, the camera won’t be able to focus on the toy.”
So far, Tesla has made no public statement about the use of these small doll heads or whether software updates will attempt to identify and prevent such fixes.
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