A 22-year-old Tesla driver says he was asleep with Full Self-Driving engaged when his car hit a California Highway Patrol cruiser on a Fairfield freeway. The crash happened just before midnight on Tuesday, October 13, on Interstate 80 near Air Base Parkway. Two officers inside the cruiser were seriously injured, taken to a hospital and later released. The driver, from Sacramento, was not seriously hurt.
What happened
CHP had closed several lanes behind flares and cones for a separate incident, and the cruiser was stopped in one of them. Dashcam video that CHP released on Thursday, October 15, shows the Tesla heading toward the cruiser at freeway speed. CHP says the car did not respond to the flares, the cones or the flashing emergency lights.
What CHP says
CHP says Full Self-Driving is a driver-assistance feature that does not relieve drivers of their responsibility, and that the driver is responsible for what the car does. It has not released the car’s model or software version, and the crash is still under investigation.
What is not confirmed
So far, the driver’s own statement is the only evidence we have seen that Full Self-Driving was on. Tesla’s vehicle logs would show it, and we have not seen a statement from Tesla. Tesla’s own name for the current system is FSD (Supervised), which signals that the driver must keep watching the road.
A known problem
Teslas hitting stopped emergency vehicles has drawn federal attention before. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation in 2021, and in December 2023 Tesla recalled more than 2 million vehicles to add stronger driver-attention alerts.
Our take: the key question is simple: was the car or the driver in control? Tesla’s logs and CHP’s final findings should answer it. Until then, the warning from CHP stands, because current driver-assist systems need an alert driver. We covered another federal look at Tesla’s driverless fleet in Tesla Robotaxi Data Lists 5 Crashes With a Remote Operator Driving.
