An outspoken critic of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system has taken to social media to demonstrate many of the limitations of the system, in particular the driver monitoring system used by Tesla.
While Tesla has been ahead of the game in many regards since its inception, it has long been behind when it comes to driver monitoring systems. In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that it said the in-car camera found in the Model 3 and Model Y would double as a monitor for the driver. This clip suggests that it still has a long way to go.
Read: Organization That Said Tesla FSD Failed To Avoid Child Dummy Runs Full Page Ad In NYT
These videos were put together by the Dawn Project and its founder Dan O’Ward, as well as YouTuber AI Addict. To test out the system, the team fitted the steering wheel with a small weight available from Amazon that fools it into thinking a driver has their hands on the wheel. It also placed a 30 lbs weight on the driver’s seat and then proceeded to place a series of random objects as well, enabled the Full Self-Driving system, and set out to see what would happen.
In the first test, a large teddy bear was placed behind the wheel and despite there clearly not being a human behind the wheel, the driver monitoring system appears to do nothing. The Tesla continues to drive itself unimpeded. Then, the testers dragged a small child doll across the road to see how the autonomous emergency braking system would work. It takes a while to detect anything and when it does, it does not brake in time.
A second test saw the teddy bear being replaced by a unicorn and once again, the driver monitoring system proved useless. The car also hit the child doll once again but this time, it didn’t even stop. In the last test, there was no object (other than a weight) in the driver’s seat and once again, the Full Self-Driving beta continued to work. It hit the child doll once again and after briefly stopping, then decided to keep on driving.
Curiously, a recent video shared to YouTuber by Whole Mars Catalog, which you can see below, shows the driver monitoring system actually working quite well. In the clip, the driver can be seen repeatedly looking at his phone and then quickly receiving a warning from the car to pay attention to the road. After ignoring these warnings four times, the car’s self-steering system was disabled for the rest of the drive.