CR Engineers Show a Tesla Will Drive With No One in the Driver’s Seat

Emotional, Burning, Unlimited Tuned Laboratory

After a fatal crash in Texas, we demonstrated how easy it is to defeat Autopilot’s driver monitoring

Consumer Reports engineers easily tricked our Tesla Model Y this week so that it could drive on Autopilot, the automaker’s driver assistance feature, without anyone in the driver’s seat—a scenario that would present extreme danger if it were repeated on public roads. Over several trips across our half-mile closed test track, our Model Y automatically steered along painted lane lines, but the system did not send out a warning or indicate in any way that the driver’s seat was empty …