Chinese drivers are using tiny plastic heads to fool Tesla’s Autopilot warranties

In China for For just $30, you can have Dwayne Johnson drive a Tesla for you. Sound too cheap to be true? Well, it is. What you’re actually buying is a small replica of The Rock’s head, designed to sit atop the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking there’s an attentive driver behind the wheel. Tesla’s self-driving system appears unable to differentiate between mannequins and a real person, allowing the actual driver to look away from the road, scroll through their phone, or even sleep — activities that are supposed to be prohibited while assisted driving features are turned on.

Last week, videos went viral showing the miniature heads at work inside Tesla cars. I fell into a deep hole while browsing e-commerce sites and online forums to learn more about where it came from. The figurines come in dozens of varieties, most of which depict Hollywood or Chinese celebrities. Some appear to be reused dolls or figurines. It’s just one example of the creative, but also potentially dangerous, ways Chinese Tesla owners are trying to circumvent the automaker’s safety barriers.

On Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao, Xianyu, and Douyin, header listings are easy to find. They range in price from $10 to $40, depending on how sophisticated they are. They can be mounted on a vehicle’s roof, windshield, or rearview mirror, and are carefully positioned to obscure the driver’s actual head and nothing else.

One Tesla Model 3 owner in China told me his mini head works perfectly. (He requested anonymity because Tesla does not allow such workarounds.) During a recent road trip, he said he turned on Autopilot on the highway and put on the fake head (a bald man who, in traditional knock-off fashion, looks a little but still very much like Dwayne Johnson) for about 250 miles of the 400-mile trip. Normally, Tesla intervenes quickly when it detects a distracted driver. With the head in place, he says he can go for 30 minutes without being interrupted.

In a video he sent me, the driver was using one hand to snack on toasted sunflower seeds and the other hand to film, while a fake head mounted in the rearview mirror prevented the camera from seeing any of what he was doing. “You should buy a toy head the size of a ping-pong ball,” the driver said on a Chinese video platform where Tesla drivers were exchanging advice with each other. “If it’s too small, the camera won’t be able to focus on the game.”

Tesla’s most advanced driver assistance system, Full Self-Driving (supervised), is still not available in China. Drivers in the country currently only have access to more basic features of cruise control, automatic steering and autopilot on some urban roads. Since the cars are not fully self-driving, Tesla asks drivers to continue to pay attention to the road. It uses a variety of monitoring features to make sure they’re not distracted, including a camera above the windshield. If the car detects that the driver is not looking ahead for a few seconds, it will ask him to redirect his attention immediately. If they don’t comply, Tesla could automatically turn off Autopilot mode or even ban the driver for a week from using driver assistance features.

Tesla drivers in other markets, including the United States, have long looked for ways to get around their cars’ safety controls. People have tried everything from wearing sunglasses to make it harder for the camera to track their eyeballs to attaching weights to their steering wheel to trick the system into thinking they’re still holding on. On Reddit, some users claimed to have searched for slightly older car models that had less capable cameras and sensors.