Lawmaker demands federal action after 43 Tesla drivers were filmed asleep at the wheel

A US congressman has asked federal regulators what they intend to do about Tesla drivers who sleep while Full Self-Driving is switched on, demanding answers from the transportation secretary by 30 September.

Raja Krishnamoorthi, who represents an Illinois district, wants to know whether Tesla’s cabin camera still works when a driver wears sunglasses or covers the lens.

He was responding to an investigation in which NBC News found 43 videos of Tesla owners asleep or otherwise distracted at the wheel, 17 of them posted this year, alongside 13 citations issued to drivers in California.

One owner told the broadcaster he sleeps while the system is running. “ As it’s gotten better, the taboo has fallen away, ” he said.

Tesla’s manual says the driver stays responsible, and the car tracks eyes, head movement and steering input. Owners defeat that with sunglasses, doll heads and photographs of themselves propped in front of the lens.

One line in the letter is about a prompt rather than a camera. Encouraging a driver the car has detected as drowsy to “ stay focused with FSD ” raises “ a fundamentally different safety question “, Krishnamoorthi wrote.

Europe reached that question first. The Dutch regulator RDW approved FSD Supervised in April under UN Regulation 171, after eighteen months, 1.6 million kilometres of European driving and more than 400 requirements.

Drivers there must pass a tutorial and a quiz before switching it on.

Five more countries followed without testing anything themselves. Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium and Slovenia accepted the Dutch certificate under the EU’s mutual recognition rules.

That is roughly 42 million people, about 9% of the bloc, covered by a single approval.

Nobody outside the RDW has read it. Tesla pressed the regulator to keep its safety assessment confidential from late 2024, and in April 2025 a Tesla representative asked it to confirm it would never release particular documents, Reuters reported .

An EU-wide vote could come in October. It would need 55% of member states representing 65% of the bloc’s population.

In the meantime NHTSA has had an engineering analysis open on 3.2 million Teslas since March. One regulator is asking whether the safeguards work, and the other has already answered, on evidence it will not show.