Tesla Driver Asleep on FSD Hits CHP Patrol Car — SkimNews
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- California Highway Patrol says a Tesla hit a Dodge Charger patrol car just before midnight on October 13 at a four-lane closure on eastbound Interstate 80 in Fairfield, seriously injuring both officers inside; the 22-year-old Sacramento driver told investigators he was asleep with FSD engaged and walked away with minor injuries.
- NHTSA's August 2021 probe into Teslas crashing into stopped emergency vehicles ended with Tesla's December 2023 recall of more than 2 million vehicles, fixed via an over-the-air software update, yet a Tesla on the company's most advanced driver-assist software allegedly drove into another emergency scene on October 13.
- Tesla's driver-monitoring cabin camera — meant to disengage FSD when a driver isn't paying attention — can be defeated by a dollar bill placed in front of it, per recent reporting cited by Electrek, which would explain how a sleeping driver traveled at freeway speed without the system intervening.
- Elon Musk told FSD owners last December they can text and drive "depending on context of surrounding traffic," even though texting while driving is illegal in California, while Tesla agreed this month to drop the "Full Self-Driving" name in Europe after German regulators called it misleading.
- A Florida jury placed a third of the blame on Tesla in its $243 million Autopilot verdict, and a June 2024 FSD crash in Fullerton saw another Tesla hit a parked police car at a fatal-crash scene where the driver admitted being on his phone — the same "complacency trap," Electrek argues, that applies in Fairfield.
- CHP has not released the Tesla model or software version; Tesla's vehicle logs will determine whether FSD was actually engaged during the crash, since the driver's account is currently the only evidence.
Why it matters: Tesla sells software branded "Full Self-Driving" while regulators in Germany forced the name change this month for being misleading, and Musk's own December guidance to text while using it puts Tesla directly at odds with California's texting-while-driving law. With Florida's $243 million Autopilot verdict assigning a third of fault to Tesla and a dollar-bill bypass of the driver-monitoring camera documented, this incident lands squarely in a pattern where NHTSA's 2021 investigation, a 2023 recall of 2 million vehicles, and named prior FSD crashes already failed to change the outcome.
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