Tesla to keep an eye on sleepy drivers

Tesla is now measuring driver drowsiness from its cabin-facing camera, according to a tweet from “Green”, a Tesla hacker known for revealing new features found in Tesla’s software.

In a tweet thread about the software update over the weekend, Green said: “They are now tracking additional things like how many yawns the driver had recently, how many blinks and how long they were, leaning. All this is to calculate how drowsy the driver is.”

Green says that blinks and yawns are being measured in the new software even when in manual mode with autopilot deactivated. They say the software is also now keeping a record of how many lane keep assist warnings and corrections are happening.

Green says that although Tesla is measuring the driver drowsiness data, they are unsure how it will be used.

“Though it’s unclear what would they do if the driver is deemed unfit to drive when not on autopilot.” said Green in the tweet thread.

The cabin-facing camera has been used for other applications over recent years including identifying when the driver is using a hand held device and activating warnings to for the driver to keep their hands on the wheel.

Elon Musk has also commented that the cabin-facing camera is used to identify the driver and front passenger’s body position during an accident and optimise the firing of the airbag in real time.

Tesla says that by default, images and video from the camera do not leave the vehicles and are not transmitted to anyone, including Tesla unless data sharing is enabled.

“If you enable data sharing and a safety critical event occurs (such as a collision), Model 3 shares short cabin camera video clips with Tesla to help us develop future safety enhancements and continuously improve the intelligence of features that rely on the cabin camera,” reads the Tesla owner manual.

“Cabin camera does not perform facial recognition or any other method of identity verification. To protect your privacy, cabin camera data is not associated with your vehicle identification number.”