Police charge another Tesla driver caught asleep in rush hour as cases pile up

A Tesla driver caught asleep behind the wheel on Ottawa’s Highway 417 during Tuesday’s rush hour now faces a careless driving charge from the Ontario Provincial Police. The photo OPP shared shows a new-generation Model Y in traffic. The charge carries a $490 fine and six demerit points on conviction. It’s at least the fifth time this year Canadian police have gone public with a sleeping Tesla driver, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s happening as “Full Self-Driving” gets better. What happened on the 417 OPP East Region posted about the stop Wednesday morning. Police didn’t name the brand or the driver-assist system, but the message was clear: “even though your vehicle has an autonomous driving feature, drivers are still required to pay due care and attention when behind the wheel.” According to OPP, the officer could see the driver’s eyes were closed and hands were off the steering wheel. Instead of lighting up the cruiser, police pulled in close to capture body camera footage first. Careless driving isn’t a parking ticket in Ontario. The $490 is the set fine, but if the case goes to court, the Highway Traffic Act allows fines up to $2,000, up to six months in jail, and a licence suspension of up to two years. Good. Canada keeps catching them Ottawa is the latest, but British Columbia has been dealing with this all year: March 17: B.C. Highway Patrol ticketed a 37-year-old woman on the Trans-Canada Highway during the morning rush: $368 for driving without due care and attention, plus $138 for speeding. She said she had “zoned out.” Police said in-car video showed she was “literally asleep at the wheel.” July: A witness filmed a Tesla driver asleep behind large sunglasses on the mountain stretch between Golden and Revelstoke, with two kids in the back. We broke down how Tesla’s driver monitoring missed it. Revelstoke RCMP followed up with the owner. August 11: B.C. Highway Patrol ticketed a 45-year-old woman allegedly asleep in a Model Y on Highway 1 in North Vancouver ($368). August 27: Another driver allegedly asleep in a Tesla on Highway 1 in Langley got the same $368 ticket, plus $81 for not producing a licence. This isn’t new in Canada either. Back in 2020, Alberta RCMP went further and criminally charged a Tesla driver caught sleeping on Autopilot at 150 km/h with dangerous driving. The U.S. has the same problem with less enforcement. In September, Colorado State Patrol got a report of a sleeping Tesla driver on I-70 near Georgetown and never found the car. The same month, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi pressed the DOT after NBC News found 43 videos of drivers apparently asleep in moving Teslas, 17 of them posted in 2026 alone. And in October, a driver told CHP he was asleep on FSD when his Tesla drove into a closed crash scene and hit a patrol car in Fairfield, California. Two officers were seriously injured. Better FSD, sleepier drivers A few years ago, FSD needed an intervention every few miles, so nobody was napping. You couldn’t. Now FSD can handle long highway stretches without a takeover, and that’s exactly when supervision breaks down. A human asked to watch a system that’s right 99% of the time stops watching. That’s automation complacency, and it’s one of the most studied problems in aviation and driving research. Waymo learned this the hard way. In 2013, Google let employees use its highway driver-assist prototype and caught people falling asleep at highway speed. It decided a system that works most of the time but still needs a human to catch its mistakes was the worst of both worlds, and it went straight to driverless. Tesla went the other way. It sells a Level 2 system called “Full Self-Driving” that’s good enough to lull people to sleep, and it puts the full responsibility on the human who’s now asleep. Tesla’s driver monitoring is too easy to beat Since FSD v12.4, Tesla has relied mainly on the cabin camera above the rearview mirror to make sure the driver is watching the road. But look at what Tesla’s own owner’s manual says about it: the camera “does not require full visibility of the driver’s eyes in order to monitor attentiveness,” and the system “is still active, for example, if the driver is wearing sunglasses.” In other words, it’s often judging head position, not whether your eyes are open. When it can’t see your hands, it falls back to asking for a bit of torque on the wheel, which a sleeping driver resting a hand on the rim can provide. The penalties are soft too. Five “strikeouts” suspend FSD for a week, and each strike is forgiven after three and a half days. And Tesla has been moving in the wrong direction. Musk said in December 2025 that FSD v14.2.1 lets drivers text “depending on context of surrounding traffic.” In May 2026, he said v14.3.3 “nags less too.” When the car does detect drowsiness, Tesla’s alert reads “Drowsiness detected. Stay focused with FSD.” That pushes a tired driver to lean harder on the system instead of pulling over. Compare that with GM’s Super Cruise, which uses a steering column camera with infrared LEDs to track head and eye position, and only works hands-free on pre-mapped highways. The Ottawa driver had their eyes closed and their hands off the wheel in rush hour traffic, and the car was still driving when an officer pulled up beside it. Whatever Tesla’s camera was checking from a foot away, it hadn’t stopped the car before a cop in the next lane did. Electrek’s Take We’re glad Canadian police are treating this seriously. A $490 fine and six points is a real deterrent, and OPP’s message is the right one: no matter what Tesla calls it, you’re the driver. But police can’t ticket their way out of this. These drivers aren’t edge cases anymore. They’re the predictable result of a system that drives well enough to make people relax, sold under a name that tells them relaxing is fine. The fix is on Tesla’s side, and it isn’t complicated. Detect closed eyes, even behind sunglasses, which is what infrared eye-tracking is built for. When a driver doesn’t respond, slow down and pull over immediately instead of escalating warnings for minutes. Stop telling drowsy drivers to “stay focused with FSD.” And make the strike system actually sting. NHTSA already forced a recall of over 2 million Teslas in December 2023 over weak Autopilot monitoring. Three years later, people are still sleeping through rush hour on FSD. If you’re driving an EV, charging it with home solar can cut your fuel costs to nearly zero. 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