A member of the US House of Representatives has asked federal regulators what they intend to do about Tesla drivers filmed asleep at the wheel. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, wrote to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on 9 September 2026 and asked for a written answer by 30 September.
What prompted it
The letter cites an NBC News investigation that identified 43 videos appearing to show people asleep in the driver's seat of moving Teslas, 17 of them posted in 2026 alone. These are not crash reports. They are clips their own subjects uploaded.
The sharpest point in the letter is about Tesla's software rather than its drivers. When the car detects a drowsy driver, it displays: "Drowsiness detected. Stay focused with FSD". Krishnamoorthi's objection is that this reads as a prompt rather than a warning — "FSD requires continuous human supervision, yet the message appears to encourage use of the system precisely when the vehicle has detected that the driver may be less capable."
The five questions
The letter asks NHTSA to answer:
- Whether it is aware of the videos, and whether they indicate a systemic problem
- Whether it has contacted Tesla about these incidents
- What data it has collected on driver inattention in crashes since 1 January 2024
- Its assessment of how effective the cabin camera actually is
- What findings would trigger a safety recall
Question four is the technical heart of it. Tesla replaced steering-wheel torque checks with camera-based gaze monitoring, and a camera can be defeated in ways a torque sensor cannot — by sunglasses, a hat, or simply something placed over the lens.
It lands on an open investigation
This is not arriving on a clean desk. NHTSA's Engineering Analysis EA26002 already covers roughly 3.2 million Tesla vehicles with FSD, and has identified nine incidents in reduced-visibility conditions including one fatality and one injury.
A letter from a single member of Congress compels nothing. What it does is put a date on the record, and add a specific question — about the drowsiness message — that the agency has not previously been asked in public.
What this means in Europe
Directly, very little: NHTSA has no jurisdiction here, and FSD (Supervised) runs in only six European markets, on v14.2.2.6 rather than the v14.3 builds in North America.
Indirectly, more. European type approval already requires driver-drowsiness and attention warning systems on new cars, and the UNECE framework that governs driver assistance is the one an eventual European FSD approval has to clear. A US finding that camera-based monitoring can be defeated would not be quietly received by the regulators Tesla still needs.
It is also the same behaviour, not a different one. TeslAnt covered a British Columbia driver fined $368 for sleeping on Highway 1 — a case where nobody ever confirmed what was driving the car. The pattern in the 43 videos is that the question is rarely asked at all. Tesla's own crash filings have repeatedly said driver assistance was engaged, including a Model Y that left an Alabama highway at 55 mph.
Tesla has not publicly responded to the letter.