Two California Highway Patrol officers are recovering from serious injuries after a Tesla drove into their patrol car at a crash scene on Interstate 80 in Fairfield. The 22-year-old driver told investigators he was asleep with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” engaged.
CHP released dashcam video of the impact on Thursday. It’s the latest Tesla to plow into an emergency scene, a failure federal regulators started investigating five years ago.
Flares, cones, and four closed lanes
The crash happened just before midnight on Tuesday, October 13, on eastbound I-80 west of Air Base Parkway. Officers were there for an earlier fatal crash: about an hour before, a 19-year-old from San Pablo lost control of his Honda Civic and was hit by a Chevrolet Tahoe. He didn’t survive.
Four lanes were already shut down behind flares and cones when the Tesla showed up at freeway speed, per CHP. It went through the closure and into a Dodge Charger patrol car with both officers sitting in it. Cameras on the Charger and on another vehicle at the scene caught the impact.
The Tesla driver, from Sacramento, walked away with minor injuries. Both crashes are still under investigation.
In its statement, CHP stressed that FSD is a driver-assistance feature that requires the person behind the wheel to stay alert and in control: “Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles.”
CHP hasn’t released the Tesla model or the software version. And for now, the driver’s word is the only evidence FSD was on. Tesla’s vehicle logs will settle that.
Five years of Teslas hitting emergency scenes
We’ve been here before. In August 2021, NHTSA opened an investigation after a series of Teslas on Autopilot crashed into stopped police cars and fire trucks, many of them at night with flares, cones, and flashing lights on scene. That probe ended with Tesla’s December 2023 recall of more than 2 million vehicles, fixed with an over-the-air update that added more driver-attention alerts.
FSD hasn’t solved it either. In June 2024, a Tesla on FSD hit a parked Fullerton police car while officers were handling, again, a fatal crash. That driver admitted to being on his phone.
A nighttime lane closure lit up with flares is about as clear a “stop or move over” signal as a road can give. If FSD was engaged in Fairfield, it drove straight into one at highway speed.
The driver monitoring problem
FSD (Supervised) uses the cabin camera to make sure the driver is watching the road. It’s supposed to nag, then disengage, when someone isn’t paying attention. A driver who’s actually asleep shouldn’t get very far.
So either he hadn’t been asleep for long, or the camera didn’t catch it. We don’t know which yet. But Tesla has been relaxing that monitoring, not tightening it. We recently reported that Tesla drivers can easily bypass the monitoring system, even a simple dollar bill placed in front of the camera can nullify it.
Last December, Elon Musk claimed FSD drivers can now text and drive “depending on context of surrounding traffic.” Texting while driving is illegal in California.
Electrek’s Take
The driver is responsible. If he fell asleep at the wheel at freeway speed, he nearly killed two cops who were already cleaning up after a fatal crash, and he should face the consequences. CHP is right about that.
But as usual, I have to emphasize Tesla’s responsibility here. Tesla doesn’t get to wash its hands of this. It sells a product called “Full Self-Driving” in the US, it agreed to drop that name in Europe this month after German regulators called it misleading, and its CEO tells owners they can text with it. When you tell people the car drives itself, some of them believe you. A 22-year-old driving home at midnight is exactly who believes you.
It’s the complacency issue I have been talking about for years. FSD gets more dangerous as it gets better. You go on social media and there are legions of Tesla fans who believe that the system is reliable for this. It clearly isn’t.
Juries are starting to see it that way too. Florida’s $243 million Autopilot verdict put a third of the blame on Tesla, and the Katy, Texas FSD crash earlier this year showed the same complacency trap from another angle. Driver fault and Tesla fault aren’t mutually exclusive.
And there’s the technical failure. Emergency scenes are the exact scenario NHTSA flagged in 2021. Five years and a 2-million-vehicle recall later, a Tesla on Tesla’s most advanced driver-assist software allegedly drove into one anyway. Musk keeps promising unsupervised FSD on customer cars. If Tesla wants to take the driver out of the loop, will it take the liability for crashes like this one? Until it does, it shouldn’t be telling anyone it’s OK to look away.
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