Electrek tracks a shift in how some Tesla owners misuse the Full Self-Driving feature, officially known as FSD (Supervised). Instead of hiding their failure to monitor the road, some drivers are now filming themselves sleeping, playing with a controller, watching livestreams, or typing on a laptop, then posting the clips on Instagram, TikTok, and X in search of engagement.
The core of these clips is the same: presenting the car as capable of taking over driving entirely, even though Tesla explicitly states that activated features require active supervision by the driver and do not make the vehicle autonomous. According to the article, the driver remains responsible for the vehicle at all times, regardless of how well the system performs at any particular moment.
Content Built Around Bypassing Safety Systems
The article describes examples of clips showing a driver reclining or sleeping while the car travels on a highway, another playing throughout the journey, as well as clips of people watching television or working on a computer from the driver’s seat. According to Electrek’s reading, the appeal of this type of content lies in showing what the car “allows” someone to do rather than testing whether it is safe or legal.
Tesla relies on torque applied to the steering wheel, along with an interior camera that monitors the driver’s eyes and issues warnings or records attention violations. Accumulating enough of these warnings results in FSD use being suspended for one week, while the company tightened camera monitoring during 2026 and also moved toward using it to verify the driver’s identity before activating the feature, according to the article.
However, the article says that methods for bypassing this monitoring have become widespread, ranging from weights placed on the steering wheel to simulate the presence of hands to covering the interior camera with a banknote. Applications and devices are also marketed to bypass the video-playback lock while the car is moving, one of the software barriers Tesla uses to prevent content from being watched while driving.
What Changes in Practice?
The most important development is not the emergence of misuse of driver-assistance systems; according to the article, this behavior is as old as Autopilot. What is new is its transition from a hidden practice into widely circulated, performative content that may give viewers the impression that ignoring the road is an acceptable function, or that the ease of bypassing monitoring means the system is designed to operate without supervision.
Legally, improvements to FSD do not change the boundary of responsibility. The question is not whether the car maintained its lane in that clip, but whether the licensed driver was attentive and prepared to intervene. The article indicates that sleeping, playing games, watching a screen, or working on a computer while sitting behind the steering wheel falls under distracted or reckless driving, actions that are illegal in the United States and in most places where the clips were filmed, according to its wording.
Why Does Electrek Believe Responsibility Goes Beyond the Driver?
The writer believes that holding drivers solely responsible does not explain the full picture. The article criticizes what it sees as a contradiction between Tesla’s marketing of FSD capabilities and earlier materials showing hands-free use of the steering wheel, and the company’s insistence in legal cases that the driver is responsible for full supervision. It cites a previous official clip showing a driver making coffee with both hands away from the wheel under the phrase “try it yourself,” while noting that the company relies on legal warnings when accidents occur.
The article places this discussion in a broader legal and regulatory context, noting that Tesla faces lawsuits totaling as much as $14.5 billion related to driver-assistance systems, and that it lost a $243 million judgment in a fatal crash involving Autopilot. It also says that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) escalated its investigation into FSD to an engineering analysis covering 3.2 million vehicles, and that Tesla data recorded 207 Autopilot and FSD crashes in a single month, a figure the article described as a record.
Editorial Analysis from certi.news
The published clips present a clear practical problem for users of driver-assistance systems: the presence of a monitoring screen or warning does not guarantee that the driver will remain attentive, just as a user’s ability to disable a safety mechanism does not make the behavior permissible or safe. At the same time, the clips alone do not prove that all FSD users behave in the same way, nor are they sufficient to establish the cause of any particular crash.
Open questions concern the extent to which Tesla, social platforms, and regulators can limit content that turns bypassing safety measures into a reproducible challenge. The article’s claims about legal responsibility, data, and crashes also require independent review when used outside the context of the published opinion. What the article establishes is that the name FSD does not change the supervisory nature of the system, and that the driver remains responsible for monitoring the road and intervening when necessary.