Drivers in China have found a remarkably low-tech way to defeat one of Tesla's key safety systems: tiny plastic heads. According to Wired's Zeyi Yang, Chinese Tesla owners are propping up miniature figurines in the driver's seat area to fool the car's distracted-driving controls — and it's working.
Tesla's driver monitoring system, designed to detect whether a human is paying attention to the road, apparently cannot tell the difference between a real face and a small plastic replica. The exploit has given rise to what Wired describes as a "cottage industry" of products built specifically for this purpose — including celebrity figurines, blinking screens, and other DIY gadgets that simulate a human presence behind the wheel.
The workaround lets drivers engage Tesla's semi-autonomous driving features without keeping their eyes on the road or their hands near the wheel, bypassing safety guardrails the company built into the system.
This matters because driver monitoring is one of the primary safeguards meant to prevent misuse of semi-autonomous driving technology. If a plastic toy costing a few dollars can reliably defeat it, the safety case for these systems weakens considerably — and regulators and automakers may need to rethink how monitoring is implemented before more powerful autonomous features reach more roads.