A Tesla driver has been caught sleeping at the wheel for the second time this year while traveling on highway in Los Angeles, California. Seth Blake, a Twitter user, posted a video this week of a Tesla driver who was asleep while driving on a busy Los Angeles freeway. The tweet said, ‘Dude is straight snoozing going 75mph on the interstate, letting his @Tesla do the work.’ Apparently, this is not the first time that this particular driver has done it during this very year.
Furthermore, this is not the first driver that has been caught while sleeping at the wheel of a Tesla while the car was on autopilot mode. A British Tesla driver lost his driving license last year. The said driver was caught sleeping in the passenger seat of his Tesla while the car was driving at 40mph in heavy traffic.
Back in 2016, a Tesla Model S driver was sleeping in slow-moving traffic in an undisclosed location. This was actually one of the first recorded cases of such incidents. While it says a lot about how good the Tesla autopilot feature is; it definitely is not what it was intended for and how it should be used.
The incidents are becoming so increasingly common that the California Highway Patrol has also come up with a new maneuver aimed at dealing with such incidents. For the case of the driver who was sleeping at the wheel of a Tesla Model 3, the police pulled in front of him, slowly applying brakes, and made use of the Tesla autopilot system to their advantage. The car automatically slowed down to prevent an accident from taking place and eventually came to a stop.
Tesla has stressed multiple times that the autopilot is not equivalent to self-driving and is only meant to provide the driver assistance. Tesla has said, ‘Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.’ What do you think of this whole phenomenon?