Tesla is rumored to be intensifying its commitment to road safety by enhancing its camera-based driver monitoring system. This revelation comes from Tesla hacker, ‘green,’ also known as @greentheonly on Twitter.
The purported upgrade is aimed at promoting driver alertness and improving overall road safety. It is said to involve the tracking of various physiological indicators such as the number of yawns, frequency and length of blinks, and even instances of the driver leaning — potential signs of driver fatigue, said ‘green’ on May 13.
Looks like Tesla is planning a big boost to (camera based) driver monitoring.
They are now tracking additional things like how many yawns the driver had recently, how many blinks and how long they were, leaning. All this is to calculate how drowsy the driver is.— green (@greentheonly) May 13, 2023
Beyond this, ‘green’ suggests that Tesla aims to implement these safety measures regardless of whether the vehicle is operating in Autopilot mode or not. Factors such as the vehicle’s position within its lane and the frequency of lane keep assist warnings and corrections will be monitored to assess driver attentiveness.
Despite the apparent advancements, questions remain over the system’s response when a driver is considered unfit to drive. ‘green’ postulates that the vehicle could escalate its warning signals and possibly activate disabled safety features.
In response to a tweet about a user’s frustration over being reprimanded for briefly checking their Tesla’s in-car display, ‘green’ disclosed that Tesla plans to improve its system’s capability to recognize when drivers are looking at mirrors or other car controls.
Sometimes on Autopilot and glancing at an Apple Watch, the cabin camera can kick you out of Autopilot and even slow down the car and turn on the hazards, if you’re looking away from the road too many times.
Back in April 2021, prior to Tesla releasing its update to leverage its cabin camera, ‘green’ also shared some videos from @rice_fry that detailed how driver monitoring would work. One month later, Tesla released its 2021.4.15.11 software update to leverage the cabin camera to monitor driver attentiveness.