In China, for just $30, you can have Dwayne Johnson drive your Tesla for you. Sounds too cheap to be true? Well, it is. What you’re actually buying is a tiny replica of The Rock’s head, designed to sit above the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking an attentive driver is behind the wheel. Tesla’s self-driving system appears unable to tell the difference between the figurines and a real person, allowing the actual driver to look away from the road, scroll through their phone, or even doze off—activities that are supposed to be prohibited while assisted-driving features are engaged.
Last week, videos showing the miniature heads at work inside Tesla cars went viral. I fell into a deep rabbit hole browsing ecommerce sites and online forums to learn more about where they came from. The figurines come in dozens of varieties, most depicting Hollywood or Chinese celebrities. Some appear to be repurposed dolls or figurines. They are just one example of the creative, but also potentially dangerous, ways that Chinese Tesla owners are trying to circumvent the car maker’s safety guardrails.
On Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao, Xianyu, and Douyin, listings for the heads are easy to find. They are priced anywhere from $10 to $40, depending on how sophisticated they are. They can be installed on the car’s ceiling, windshield, or rearview mirror, and are carefully positioned to block the actual driver’s head and nothing else.
One Tesla Model 3 owner in China told me that his miniature head works perfectly. (He asked to remain anonymous because Tesla doesn’t allow such DIY workarounds.) During a recent road trip, he says he turned on highway autopilot and put the fake head (a bald man, which, in classic knockoff fashion, looks slightly off but still closely resembles Dwayne Johnson) on for about 250 miles of the 400-mile trip. Normally, Tesla quickly intervenes when it detects a distracted driver. With the head in place, he says he could go 30 minutes without being interrupted.
In a video he sent me, the driver was using one hand to snack on roasted sunflower seeds and another hand to film, while the fake head suctioned to the rearview mirror blocked the camera from seeing any of what he was doing. “You should buy a toy head about the size of a ping pong ball,” the driver said on a Chinese video platform where Tesla drivers were exchanging tips with one another. “If it’s too small, the camera won’t be able to focus on the toy.”
Tesla’s most advanced driver-assistance system, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), is still not available in China. Drivers in the country can currently only access more basic features for cruise control, autosteering, and autopilot on some urban roads. Because the cars are not fully autonomous, Tesla requires that drivers still pay attention to the road. It uses a variety of monitoring features to make sure they aren’t distracted, including a camera located above the windshield. If the car detects that a driver is not looking ahead for a few seconds, it will ask them to redirect their attention immediately. If they don’t comply, Tesla can automatically shut off autopilot mode or even ban the driver for a week from using driver-assistance features.
Tesla drivers in other markets, including the US, have long searched for ways to get around their car’s safety controls. People have tried everything from wearing sunglasses to make it harder for the camera to track the eyeballs to installing weights on their steering wheel to trick the system into thinking they are still holding on. On Reddit, some users even claimed to have sought out slightly older car models that have less capable cameras and sensors.
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