Driver Who Hit CHP Cruiser Says Tesla FSD Was On

The California Highway Patrol released dashcam video on Thursday, Oct. 15, of a Tesla striking a patrol car on eastbound Interstate 80 in Fairfield, California. The 22-year-old Sacramento driver told investigators he was asleep with Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" engaged, CBS Sacramento reported. CBS presented that as his account and did not confirm the system was active.

The crash happened just before midnight on Tuesday, Oct. 13, west of Air Base Parkway. The Tesla entered a closure at freeway speed and hit a Dodge Charger with two officers inside, according to CHP statements relayed by CBS and by ABC7 San Francisco.

What CHP has and has not confirmed about the Oct. 13 crash

The outlets agree on the core facts and disagree on two details. The table separates what each reported.

Item	Reported	Source
Lanes closed	Four, behind flares and cones	CBS Sacramento
Officers	Two, seriously injured, treated at a Fairfield hospital and released	ABC7
Driver injuries	Minor	CBS Sacramento
Driver injuries	None	ABC7
Tesla model and software version	Not released	CBS Sacramento, Electrek
Charges	None reported	CBS Sacramento

The officers were at the scene because of an earlier crash about an hour before, in which a 19-year-old from San Pablo lost control of a Honda Civic and was hit by a Chevrolet Tahoe. He died, Electrek reported. Both crashes remain under investigation.

The agency's own wording differs by outlet. CBS quotes CHP as saying "Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles." ABC7 quotes a CHP social media post reading "Full Self-Driving does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to keep everyone safe." ABC7 adds that CHP said the Tesla did not respond to flares, cones or flashing emergency lights.

Why the Full Self-Driving claim is unverified

No outlet reports Tesla's vehicle logs, which would show whether the system was engaged and what the cabin camera saw. Electrek, which is the only outlet of the three to discuss the monitoring hardware, says FSD (Supervised) uses a cabin camera to check driver attention and is designed to warn and then disengage when the driver is not watching the road. It also says the camera may have missed a sleeping driver, or the driver may have been asleep only briefly. Both possibilities are Electrek's speculation, not findings.

Electrek also reported in June 2026 that a dollar bill placed in front of the camera can defeat the monitoring. Nothing in the three reports connects that method to this crash.

CHP describes Full Self-Driving as a driver-assistance feature that requires an alert driver, which matches how Tesla markets the product as FSD (Supervised). A driver who was asleep was not supervising, whatever the software was doing.

The earlier emergency-scene crashes

Electrek lists three precedents, and none comes from CHP or a regulator in these reports, so treat them as Electrek's account:

• August 2021: NHTSA opened an investigation after several Teslas using Autopilot hit stopped police cars and fire trucks.
• December 2023: the probe ended with a recall of more than 2 million vehicles, fixed with an over-the-air update that added driver-attention alerts.
• June 2024: a Tesla using FSD hit a parked Fullerton police car during a fatal-crash response, and Electrek says that driver was on his phone.

For how NHTSA has handled other Tesla automation questions, see our reporting on the Cybercab audit and on remote-operator robotaxi crashes.

What would settle it

The fact that decides this story is whether Tesla's logs show FSD engaged at 11 p.m. to midnight on Oct. 13. CHP has not said it has requested them, and none of the three outlets reports a charging decision on the driver. Until the logs or a CHP finding appear, "asleep on Full Self-Driving" is a defence-shaped sentence from one person, and the two injured officers are the only parts of the account that two outlets have confirmed.