A motorist has yelled at a fellow driver to ‘wake up’ after he was captured fast asleep behind the wheel of a self-driving car on a busy highway.
Video shows a car pull up alongside a white Tesla travelling at speed along Sydney’s M2 motorway as its driver slept with his head tilted back on the headrest.
The driver filming the incident honked his horn and yelled: ‘Hey. F***ing wake up.’
The Tesla driver quickly woke up and waved apologetically to his fellow motorist.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software became available in Australia last September for authorised Model 3 and Model Y vehicles equipped with the Hardware 4 (HW4) camera suite.
The driver-assistance system can navigate, brake, indicate, and change lanes autonomously, though it requires constant driver supervision.
It’s classified as a Level 2 system, which means it’s not a fully autonomous vehicle.
Swinburne University Professor of Transport Technology Hussein Dia said last year that the new Tesla technology was exciting but had limits.
The Tesla driver appeared to be asleep behind the wheel of his self-driving car on a highway
The driver moves up alongside the Tesla and is about to discover the man behind the wheel is asleep despite travelling on a motorway
‘I think the name “Full Self-Driving” is quite misleading. This is what we call “an advanced driver assist” or “partial automation”,’ he told the ABC.
‘It has some very advanced features… [but] we think of it more as maybe an advanced learner driver rather than a professional chauffeur.’
In Australia, road laws apply to vehicles with driver assistance systems ‘with a human driver remaining in control’, according to the National Transport Commission.
Under Level 2 automation, the driver must oversee the system, observe the road and be ready to take over in an instant.
While the car can do a lot of the driving, legally the person in the driver’s seat is the driver of the vehicle.
Tesla’s website says drivers must be fully attentive while engaged in Autopilot mode.
The car giant warns that if the car senses the driver is not paying enough attention, they will be locked out of Autopilot mode.
In the United States, Tesla has faced legal action after its driver assistance technology was involved in several fatal crashes.
Tesla’s use of the words ‘Full Self-Driving’ has been called misleading by experts
The self-driving cars are growing in popularity in Australia
In 2016, a Tesla Model S crashed into a truck in Florida while Autopilot was engaged, killing the driver.
Two years later, a Tesla Model X slammed into a highway barrier and burst into flames in California.
Overseas safety experts have expressed concern that self-driving Tesla’s can make their drivers feel so comfortable that they relax too much behind the wheel.
European safety bodies like Euro NCAP have criticised Tesla for using terms like ‘Autopilot’ and ‘Full Self-Driving’, claiming they are misleading.
Aussies online have generally given the self-driving cars positive reviews.
‘I’ve had it for three months, my best way to describe it is that it’s incredible just how well it works, especially how it deals with weird edge cases such as construction, people doing dumb things, and around pedestrians,’ one EV owner wrote on Reddit.
‘It also makes a road trip a breeze. Would I be comfortable sitting in the back seat while it drove for me? It’s absolutely not there yet.
‘That’s the easiest way I can describe it.’
The Daily Mail has contacted Tesla for comment.
