In China a for just $30, you can have Dwayne Johnson drive your Tesla for you. Sounds too low-cost to be true? Well, that’s how it is. What you’re actually buying is a petite replica of The Rock’s head, designed to be placed above your rearview mirror and trick your Tesla into thinking there’s an attentive driver behind the wheel. Tesla’s self-driving system appears to be unable to tell the difference between the figurines and a real person, allowing the driver to take their eyes off the road, scroll through their phone, or even take a nap – activities that should be prohibited when driving assist features are turned on.
Last week, there were videos of miniature heads at work in Tesla cars it went viral. I fell down a deep rabbit hole, browsing e-commerce sites and online forums to learn more about where they were coming from. The figurines come in dozens of varieties, most of them depicting Hollywood or Chinese stars. Some look like modified dolls or figurines. It’s just one example of the artistic but also potentially hazardous ways Chinese Tesla owners are trying to bypass the automaker’s security barriers.
It is effortless to find head deals on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Xianyu and Douyin. Their prices range from $10 to $40, depending on the level of advancement. They can be mounted on the ceiling of the car, on the windshield or on the rearview mirror. They are carefully placed to cover the driver’s head and nothing else.
One Tesla Model 3 owner in China told me that his miniature head works perfectly. (He asked to remain anonymous because Tesla doesn’t allow this type of DIY solution.) On a recent trip, he says he turned on Autopilot on the highway and put on a phony head (a bald man who, in the classic way, looks a bit weird but still looks a lot like Dwayne Johnson) for about 250 miles of the 400-mile trip. Typically, Tesla intervenes quickly when it detects a distracted driver. He says he can go 30 minutes without interruption with his head in place.
In the video he sent me, the driver was eating roasted sunflower seeds with one hand and filming with the other, while a phony head was held up to the rearview mirror, preventing the camera from seeing what he was doing. “You should buy a toy head the size of a ping-pong ball,” the driver said on a Chinese video platform where Tesla drivers exchanged tips. “If it’s too small, the camera won’t be able to focus on the toy.”
Tesla’s most advanced driver assistance system, fully autonomous (supervised), is still not available in China. Drivers in the country currently only have access to more basic cruise control, automatic steering and Autopilot features on certain urban roads. Because the cars are not fully autonomous, Tesla requires drivers to continue to pay attention to the road. It uses a variety of monitoring features, including a camera placed above the windshield, to make sure no one is distracting them. If the car detects that the driver is not looking ahead for a few seconds, it will ask him to immediately redirect his attention. If they don’t comply, Tesla may automatically turned off autopilot, or even ban the driver from using driver assistance features for a week.
Tesla drivers in other markets, including the US, have long been looking for ways to bypass security controls in their cars. People have tried everything wearing sunglasses to make it harder for the camera to track your eyeballs, to installing weights on the handlebars to trick the system into thinking they’re still holding on. On Reddit, some users even claimed to have been looking from slightly older car models that have less effective cameras and sensors.