Last year, Tesla (TSLA) introduced human attention monitoring while the car is driven by Autopilot Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD). To monitor the human driver, Tesla uses the cabin camera (installed atop the rearview mirror).
This attention monitoring feature initially only detected if the human present in the driver’s seat is looking at the road or not. If the driver was distracted, the system would issue a warning on the center screen and disable Autopilot for the rest of the journey.
However, as soon as a driver wore sunglasses, the system started giving an attention warning. In the FSD v12.5.4 update in September 2024, Tesla added support for sunglasses. Now you could wear sunglasses and the FSD attention monitoring system wouldn’t argue anymore.
However, there was one interesting new feature that many Tesla FSD users didn’t notice much in this update. The system was now also visually monitoring your hands as well.
Tesla FSD (Supervised) constantly monitors the driver’s hands to see if they’re free or holding a handheld device like a mobile phone or tablet. However, like we see in the picture above, a Tesla owner tried to trick the system by holding an energy bar in his hand, but the system still suspended Autopilot.
Holding something like a chocolate or a phone doesn’t make a difference for the AI working behind the scenes to monitor the driver’s attention. And this makes sense, anything in the hands makes it difficult to take over the steering wheel if an unsafe scenario suddenly appears.
FSD beta testers report that as soon as you put down the handheld device, Autopilot resumes in a few seconds and is not suspended for the rest of the drive.
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