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A Tesla driver was found passed out behind the wheel of his car as it drove itself through busy streets in Vacaville, California. Police caught up with the vehicle and arrested the driver on suspicion of driving under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana.
It is the latest in a long string of incidents where Tesla owners have treated the automaker’s driver-assist systems as if they were a designated driver — and it keeps happening because Tesla keeps marketing them that way.
What happened in Vacaville
According to a post from the Vacaville Police Department, dispatchers received a call shortly after 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25, from a community member who spotted another driver apparently slumped over and unconscious at the wheel of a moving car.
The bigger problem: the car was still rolling through busy city streets on its own.
The caller stayed on the line and fed real-time updates to dispatch, which allowed officers to catch up with the vehicle and bring it to a safe stop near Elmira Road and Shasta Drive. Police initially treated the situation as a potential medical emergency.
It wasn’t. Investigators say the driver was under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, and he was arrested for DUI. Photos released by Vacaville PD show a four-pack of Sutter Home Cabernet Sauvignon and a Round Table pizza box on the passenger side of the cabin.
In its statement, Vacaville PD took the opportunity to remind drivers that “California drivers are permitted to use newer assistive driving safety features in their vehicles. But just like every other driver on the road, they still need to be conscious, alert, and not under the influence while operating them.”
Not the first time — and not even close
This is far from a new pattern. Electrek has been documenting drunk drivers using Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” as a chauffeur for years.
In 2018, a Tesla Model S driver was pulled over by California Highway Patrol after sleeping drunk for about 7 miles on Autopilot before officers could safely bring the car to a stop. That same year, another driver passed out drunk in his Model S and tried to use Autopilot as a defense.
In 2021, a Tesla in Norway actually managed to bring itself to a stop after the drunk driver became unconscious at the wheel — which was treated as a feel-good story at the time, but really just illustrated the same problem in a different costume.
And just last fall, we covered a Tesla owner who openly bragged on video about driving drunk on Full Self-Driving, arguing the car was a safer driver than he was.
The names and locations change. The dynamic doesn’t.
Electrek’s Take
Let’s be clear about what Tesla’s driver-assist systems are and aren’t. Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” are Level 2 systems. The driver is legally and operationally responsible for the vehicle at all times. Falling asleep at the wheel is not a feature — it’s a failure mode the driver monitoring system is supposed to prevent.
Unfortunately, people who aim to abuse the system because they are overconfident in it find ways around the driver monitoring.
The problem is that Tesla has spent the better part of a decade marketing these systems with names like “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving,” releasing demo videos that show the car driving with no human input, and selling the package on the promise that the car will eventually drive itself. When you tell people for ten years that their car can drive itself, you cannot then act surprised when some of them get in drunk and pass out.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: until Tesla either delivers on actual unsupervised autonomy or stops selling the dream that it has, these stories are going to keep landing in our inbox. The community member who called dispatch in Vacaville is the real safety system here, not the car, and definitely not the driver. How many more arrests, crashes, and lawsuits does it take before Tesla’s marketing catches up with the reality of what its cars can actually do?
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