Two people in a car on Highway 1 near Mountain Highway in North Vancouver looked across at a Tesla just before 3:30 p.m. on 11 August 2026 and saw the driver apparently asleep. The passenger filmed it. They called police.
B.C. Highway Patrol tracked the registered owner — a 45-year-old man from Maple Ridge who matched the witnesses' description — and issued a $368 ticket for driving without due care and attention.
The police statement did not hedge. "Police will not debate the merits of self-driving technology with sleeping drivers," said Sergeant Michael McLaughlin. "It's illegal in B.C., and we're here to enforce the law and keep roads safe."
What was not established
No authority has said which system, if any, was steering. Police did not confirm that Autopilot or Full Self-Driving was engaged, and Tesla has not commented. Drive Tesla Canada reports this is at least the fourth incident involving an inattentive Tesla driver in the province this year, a count attributable to that outlet rather than to police figures.
That gap is worth naming rather than filling. A driver asleep on a motorway is an offence whether the car has driver assistance or not, and the ticket was written for inattention, not for misusing a feature. The reason the story travels is the inference readers draw — that nobody falls asleep at 100 km/h unless they trust something else to drive.
Why a Canadian traffic ticket matters in Europe
Because of what Europe is about to vote on.
Tesla is seeking EU-wide approval for FSD (Supervised) through the Article 39 derogation route, with the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles expected to vote on 6 October. Tesla has asked for five exemptions from current rules, and attention-monitoring requirements are one of them.
Tesla's own submitted evidence argues the case from the opposite direction: its Article 39 dashboard reports 67% fewer driver-fatigue episodes with FSD active than in manual driving. That is a coherent claim — a system that nags an inattentive driver and holds the lane may well produce less fatigue-related risk overall than a tired human alone.
It is also not the claim regulators are being asked to weigh. The question in front of the TCMV is not whether FSD reduces average fatigue; it is what happens in the tail, when a driver treats a supervised system as an unsupervised one. Cases like this one are the tail, and there is no European equivalent of the US NTSB to investigate them once the feature is approved — a gap the European Transport Safety Council raised when it asked for the vote to be postponed.
| Where the argument sits | |
|---|---|
| Tesla's fatigue evidence | 67% fewer fatigue episodes with FSD active |
| Tesla's request | relax attention-monitoring requirements |
| The counter-case | supervised systems get used unsupervised |
| Vote | 6 October 2026, needs 15 of 27 states and 65% of population |
Sweden has already urged the EU to reject the application unless Tesla drops its request on speed behaviour. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Finland and Ireland are still reviewing.
For a European owner the practical point is narrower and unchanged by any vote: FSD (Supervised) requires you to be awake and responsible, and no jurisdiction in Europe treats a sleeping driver as anything other than the driver.