Krishnamoorthi puts Tesla's "Stay focused with FSD" prompt in front of DOT

According to Krishnamoorthi's letter, a Tesla that has already decided the driver may be drowsy displays "Drowsiness detected. Stay focused with FSD," one of two strings Tesla reportedly began showing with software update 2025.32.3; the other reads "Lane drift detected. Let FSD assist so you can stay focused" ^[7]. Tesla's own documentation says Autopilot and Full Self-Driving require active driver supervision and are not autonomous driving systems ^[4].

Krishnamoorthi drew the line inside the letter itself. "Advising an alert driver who experiences a momentary lane drift to use a driver-assistance feature is one thing," he wrote ^[8]. "Encouraging a driver whom the vehicle has detected as drowsy to 'stay focused with FSD' presents a fundamentally different safety question," he wrote, adding that "the message appears to encourage use of the system precisely when the vehicle has detected that the driver may be less capable of providing that supervision" ^[9].

The assumption written into any supervised feature is that the manual and the warnings hold the human in the loop ^[4]. The videos record what some drivers actually did. NBC News identified 43 clips appearing to show individuals asleep in the driver's seat of moving Teslas, 17 of them posted this year ^[3]. That leaves 26 from earlier years ^[14], so roughly 40 percent of the catalogue arrived in the past twelve months ^[15].

The catalogue counts uploads. With no denominator, it cannot establish how often anyone sleeps behind the wheel of a Tesla; what it establishes is that 43 such clips were found and 17 went up this year ^[3].

The regulatory precedent for reading a product this way already exists. In an earlier engineering analysis of Autopilot, NHTSA concluded that Tesla's system did not sufficiently ensure that drivers remained attentive and used the technology appropriately ^[5], and identified a mismatch between Autopilot's substantial control over the vehicle and its safeguards for keeping drivers engaged ^[6]. The finding was about the monitoring design.

The agency's open work asks a different question. Its ongoing engineering analysis covers approximately 3.2 million Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD ^[10] and examines whether FSD's degradation-detection system can identify reduced roadway visibility and give drivers an adequate warning with sufficient time to respond ^[11]. Nine incidents are in scope, including one fatality and one injury ^[12]. Where that inquiry asks what the system detects, the letter asks what the interface does with a detection the system already has.

For anyone shipping driver assistance, the test this implies is narrow enough to run on a whiteboard. One column holds every state the product can infer about the operator: drowsy, hands off the wheel, eyes off the road, out of position. The next holds the response the product actually ships today for each one, and the last records whether that response lowers the attention the next minute demands or raises it. A drowsy state that routes to a feature requiring continuous supervision sits in the wrong column. A favourable crash-rate chart will not move it out. Krishnamoorthi asked DOT and NHTSA to ensure that manufacturers "have adequate safeguards to prevent foreseeable misuse and that drivers are not encouraged to place dangerous levels of reliance on systems that still require their full attention" ^[13].