Tesla Finally Adds Better Driver Monitoring For Its Model X and Model Y

Tesla has enabled the in-car camera above the rear-view mirror in the Model 3 and Model Y to help make sure drivers pay attention to the road while using Autopilot, the vehicles’ advanced driver assistance systems.

Hitherto, the company has measured driver’s attention through torque sensors in the steering wheel that look for resistance — a stark process to guarantee that drivers keep their hands on the wheel. If it doesn’t give adequate feedback, the car performs a series of escalating visual and audible signals.

Regulatory and safety experts had spent years appealing to the company to equip its cars with better monitoring mechanism to support the Autopilot system but it failed to comply.

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, had at some point admitted that crashes which involved Autopilot were due to complacency. Then he refused his own engineers’ calls to add more robust driver monitoring to the company’s vehicles. Musk said during that time that the technology was “ineffective.” Companies like General Motors and Ford currently sell cars with camera-based eye-tracking systems that ensure that the drivers pay attention to the road while using hands-free driving features. 

However, a reporter at the Verge confirmed that a Twitter user took delivery of a new Model Y and tweeted an image on Thursday, 27th May, that shows software release notes describing the new safety feature. 

In his subsequent tweets, the owner of the Model Y said that the steering wheel sensor alerts were still active.

The Verge’s news also confirmed that Electrek has also seen the release notes.

“Model S and Model X vehicles made before 2021 do not have a cabin camera, though the redesigned versions announced in January (which have still not shipped) are supposed to have them,” the reporter further added. 

Tesla doesn’t define the term “driver inattentiveness” that it uses in the release notes, or what happens if it decides someone isn’t paying sufficient attention. Earlier this year, hacker @greentheonly and an accomplice were able to tease out what a work-in-progress version of the camera-based driver monitoring system could see. It was particularly good at noticing when the driver looked down at a phone, though it struggled in low light.

The in-car camera was pretty much benign in the early going with the Model 3 and Model Y, though Tesla started using it to make sure that drivers in the beta test of its “Full Self-Driving” version of Autopilot were paying attention to the road. Musk said in March that Tesla removed some beta testers from the program because they “did not pay sufficient attention.”

The addition of camera-based driver monitoring feature also follows a fresh wave of scrutiny on Autopilot, which rose up after a pair of fatal crashes where it initially appeared the driver assistance system may have been involved — though, in one case, officials walked back the claim that Autopilot was active, and in the other, an early report from the National Transportation Safety Board made it seem unlikely that the system was in use. There have also been a number of recently documented cases of social media users posting videos that show them fooling Autopilot into thinking someone is still in the driver’s seat.