A safety driver in a Tesla robotaxi fell asleep multiple times during a ride, with the vehicle’s attention monitoring system repeatedly alerting the driver to regain focus, according to a passenger who documented the incident and reported it to regulators.
The passenger, posting on Reddit under the username “ohmichael,” said the incident occurred just over a week ago in San Francisco using Tesla‘s ride-hailing service operating in the city.
The user shared video footage showing the safety driver appearing to doze off while the autonomous vehicle was in operation.
“The safety driver literally fell asleep at least three times during the ride,” the Reddit user wrote in a post published Monday to the r/sanfrancisco subreddit.
“Each time the car’s pay attention safety alert went off and the beeping is what woke him back up,” he added.
Below is the video shared by the passenger.
The passenger said he reported the incident through Tesla‘s app to the robotaxi support team and indicated he had video evidence, but received no response from the company.
After waiting more than a week for Tesla to address the issue privately, he decided to post publicly about the safety concern.
The user also reported the incident to the California Public Utilities Commission, the state regulator overseeing passenger carriers, according to responses in the Reddit thread.
Previous Positive Experiences
The passenger said he had used Tesla‘s robotaxi service multiple times previously without incident.
“I have used the service a few times before and it has always been great,” he wrote. “I actually felt safer than in a regular rideshare.”
However, the most recent experience raised significant safety concerns despite the passenger’s stated comfort during the ride.
“I actually felt ok in the car, because it was going relatively slowly, but looking back, I probably should have intervened in the moment,” the user wrote in response to another user.
The admission that the passenger did not immediately intervene highlights a potential gap in protocols for reporting safety driver violations in real-time during autonomous vehicle operations.
Regulatory Implications
The incident comes as Tesla seeks to expand its autonomous ride-hailing operations and remove safety drivers entirely.
In Austin, where the service already covers about 80% of the city, Musk said in late October that Tesla planned to remove safety riders by the end of the year.
Just a few weeks ago, the company had backtracked on this target, with Musk saying that the company planned to remove the safety drivers from its Robotaxi vehicles “within a few months.”
Safety drivers serve as a critical backstop in semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicle testing and operations, required to monitor the vehicle’s performance and take control if the system encounters situations it cannot handle.
California regulations require autonomous vehicle operators to ensure safety drivers remain attentive and capable of taking control at all times.
The Reddit post has reached more than 11,000 upvotes and nearly 1,000 comments as of Tuesday afternoon.
Expansion x Permits
Elon Musk believes that, as autonomous ride-hailing services expand across several cities in the US, regulatory agents will “have fewer and fewer reasons to say no.”
“And then you’ve got this, you know, you’ve got the accident statistics at scale, and you can show that autonomous miles save lives,” he added, noting that there are “unequivocal, you know, billions of miles to prove it.”
“Then I think it’s hard for regulators to say no,” he concluded.
Since Tesla deployed its ride-hailing service in late June in Austin, with an initial fleet of Model Ys modified with the Robotaxi FSD, it has reported four incidents to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
According to VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy in the latest earnings call, the company has covered over 250,000 miles of the service in Austin and has crossed “more than a million miles” in the Bay Area — where a person is present in the driver’s seat.
The service has experienced roughly one crash for every 312,500 miles driven.
The company is also hiring an insurance claims specialist to handle incidents involving its autonomous ride-hailing vehicles.
