Where there’s a will to bypass something, there’s usually a way. A cottage industry has sprung up in China around tiny plastic celebrity heads designed to fool Tesla’s Autopilot driver-monitoring camera. The in-cabin camera is supposed to confirm that the person behind the wheel is paying attention to the road, but according to a new Wired investigation, drivers have found that strategically positioning a miniature doll head in the camera’s field of view satisfies the system’s detection criteria. The gadgets, priced between $10 and $40 on Chinese e-commerce platforms, are typically mounted on the ceiling, windshield, or rearview mirror.
One Model 3 owner told Wired he drove 250 of a 400-mile road trip with a bald Dwayne Johnson knockoff head in place, one hand eating sunflower seeds, the other filming video, without triggering a single alert. Tesla has not commented and does not yet appear to have a software countermeasure yet. Safety experts note this is the same dynamic that played out with steering wheel weights on earlier Autopilot systems, suggesting that the arms race between workarounds and safety technology is ongoing.
Source: Digital Trends
