Tesla cabin camera fooled by $30 doll heads
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Tesla's cabin camera driver-monitoring system can be fooled by small plastic doll heads sold on Chinese e-commerce platforms for $20 to $50, marketed as "travel companions" and "dashboard decorations" but clearly intended to bypass attention tracking during Autopilot and FSD (Supervised) use.
- A Tesla Model 3 owner in China mounted a Dwayne Johnson figurine head near the rearview mirror and reportedly drove for 30 minutes without a single safety alert, according to Digital Trends, with one hand eating sunflower seeds and the other filming video at highway speeds.
- Tesla previously relied on steering wheel torque sensors to confirm driver engagement, and NHTSA issued a cease-and-desist over a product called the "Autopilot Buddy," after which Tesla added the cabin camera — which the $30 plastic toy now defeats.
- Tesla recently launched FSD (Supervised) in China and is already facing a fraud lawsuit from 10 Chinese owners over "Full Self-Driving" marketing claims, and recently cracked down on over 100,000 vehicles using hacked FSD enabler devices.
- NHTSA has identified 80 FSD traffic violations, including running red lights and wrong-lane entries, and has upgraded its investigation to an engineering analysis covering 3.2 million vehicles — the final step before a potential recall.
- Electrek argues the deeper problem is the culture around Level 2 automation: names like "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" set expectations the technology cannot meet, and a static plastic head is not a substitute for an attentive human driver.
- Tesla's cabin camera lacks liveness detection, gaze tracking that accounts for occlusion, and stricter anti-spoofing measures, and the company undermines its own safety messaging by promoting FSD misuse in official videos.
Why it matters: If a $30 plastic toy can defeat Tesla's cabin camera, the monitoring system Tesla promotes as the smarter answer to steering-wheel weights is not robust enough, exposing the company to the 3.2-million-vehicle NHTSA engineering analysis — the final stage before a potential recall. The timing is worse because Tesla just rolled FSD (Supervised) out in China while already defending a fraud suit from 10 Chinese owners, meaning every bypass device sold there adds to documented real-world misuse the regulator is already tracking.
Ask SkimNews
