June 18, 2019—Tesla drivers have been caught sleeping at the wheel, sometimes using a nag defeating device to trick the system into thinking that someone is applying pressure to the steering wheel in order for it to stay active, reported Electrek.
One person reported that he caught a Tesla driver sleeping at the wheel in Los Angeles last week and that if his little device tied around the steering wheel fell off and he was sleeping, he would have slammed into someone going 65 miles per hour. He is probably referring to an Autopilot nag defeating device, like the Autopilot Buddy, which was shut down by NHTSA last summer and later relaunched as ‘phone mount’ to get around the ban.
If it “fell off”, the car wouldn’t just “slam into somebody”, it would actually start giving the driver alerts to hold the steering wheel and if the driver wouldn’t respond, the vehicle would attempt to safely come to a stop on the side of the road.
