Tiny Fake Heads and Blinking Screens: Chinese Drivers Are Outsmarting Tesla's Safety Cameras

A cottage industry of DIY gadgets is helping Chinese Tesla owners bypass the automaker's distracted-driver monitoring system — and it's remarkably low-tech. For as little as $10, drivers can buy miniature celebrity figurines — including a knockoff Dwayne Johnson head — designed to sit in front of the in-cabin camera and impersonate an attentive driver. One Tesla Model 3 owner used the fake head for roughly 250 miles of a 400-mile road trip, going 30 uninterrupted minutes while snacking and filming with both hands. Normally, Tesla would intervene within seconds of detecting inattention.

The gadgets emerged in response to a Tesla software update rolled out in China in October that activated distracted-driver monitoring via the car's interior camera. When drivers initially tried blocking the camera with webcam covers, Tesla issued a warning that doing so would disable assisted-driving features entirely. That prompted the shift toward more sophisticated workarounds. Products now range from static printed photos of people to lenticular novelty cards that mimic blinking as the car sways, all the way to pocket-sized looping video screens that play footage of a person moving their head and eyes. One seller claimed their video screen achieves a zero-percent error rate and has already been sold to customers in the US, Canada, and South Korea.

The scale remains niche for now — individual product listings show only a few dozen units sold — but the trend is drawing attention. Chinese social media users have pushed back, frequently comparing the fake-head gadgets to seatbelt-bypass clips: a small convenience purchased at real safety cost. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about the products or any planned countermeasures.

The phenomenon isn't unique to China. Tesla drivers in other markets have long tried workarounds — wearing sunglasses to obscure eye-tracking, adding steering wheel weights to simulate a driver's grip, or deliberately seeking older vehicle models with less capable sensors. But the Chinese market's speed and creativity in commodifying these exploits stands out. The fact that a $30 toy head can defeat an AI-powered safety system raises pointed questions about how robust these driver-monitoring technologies actually are, and how much more automakers need to invest before driver-assistance features can be trusted not to enable the very distracted driving they're meant to prevent.