A Tesla Robotaxi ‘safety driver’ in San Francisco was caught on video sleeping in the middle of a drive with a customer.
The good news is that the system did wake him up, but certainly a bit late.
Tesla currently claims to be operating its ‘Robotaxi’ service in Austin, Texas, and the Bay Area in California.
However, the services differ widely across markets, mainly because California has significantly stricter autonomous-driving laws than Texas. It requires companies to prove they can operate as a level 4 autonomous driving system – something Tesla is not prepared to do, as it has yet to even apply for the required permit.
In effectiveness, it means Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ service in the Bay Area has ‘safety drivers’ in the driver’s seat, who are responsible for the vehicle at all times, just like any other level 2 ADAS system, such as Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving (Supervised)’.
In Austin, Tesla moved the ‘safety driver’ from the driver’s seat to the front passenger seat simply because regulators allow it. The monitor still has a finger on a killswitch at all times – ready to stop the vehicle.
We recently reported that Tesla has a worryingly high crash rate in Austin, with the safety driver in the passenger seat.
Now, in San Francisco, a Tesla Robotaxis ‘safety driver’ was spotted asleep at the wheel. A local Robotaxi user posted the video on Reddit:
The user wrote:
I took a Tesla Robotaxi in SF just over a week ago. I have used the service a few times before and it has always been great. I actually felt safer than in a regular rideshare.
This time was different. The safety driver literally fell asleep at least three times during the ride. Each time the car’s pay attention safety alert went off and the beeping is what woke him back up.
In the video, you can see that Tesla’s same FSD driver monitoring system appears to kick in during the Robotaxi ride and wakes up the safety driver.
However, the anti-drowsiness system is supposed to prevent this from happening and audibly warn the driver before they fall asleep with their head down like this, and suggest that they stop the drive.
The user says that he reported the issue to Tesla, but he hasn’t heard back:
I reported it through the app to the Robotaxi support team and told them I had videos, but I never got a response.
I held off on posting anything because I wanted to give Tesla a chance to respond privately. It has been more than a week now and this feels like a serious issue for other riders too.
The video went viral on Reddit, and another user said that the same thing happened to them, adding that they believe it was the exact driver.
Electrek’s Take
It is undoubtedly a tedious job. The system handles virtually all driving tasks, but the safety driver remains critical and must be ready to take control at all times.
As shown in Tesla’s ADS crash reporting in Austin, Tesla’s system still makes mistakes, and the safety drivers are there to correct them.
Tesla’s incidents in the Bay Area are harder to report because they fall under Tesla’s ADAS incident reporting, and since the automaker redacts most critical information, we don’t know whether they happened in the Robotaxi fleet or with regular FSD customers. They are dozens of those every month in the NHTSA reports.
In short, the job must be taken seriously. The driver-monitoring anti-drowsiness detector should have kicked in much sooner, especially since it was the third time he had fallen asleep on this ride, according to the user.
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