A 22-year-old driver from Sacramento told investigators he was asleep with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) engaged when his car hit a California Highway Patrol (CHP) Dodge Charger on Interstate 80 in Fairfield, just before midnight on Tuesday, Oct. 13. Two officers inside the patrol car suffered serious injuries and are recovering. The driver, who was not identified in public accounts of the crash, had minor injuries. The software’s role has not been independently confirmed, and the driver’s own account is the only evidence so far that it was running.
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A closed freeway lane at Air Base Parkway
The collision happened on eastbound Interstate 80 west of Air Base Parkway. About an hour earlier, a 19-year-old from San Pablo had lost control of a Honda Civic and been struck by a Chevrolet Tahoe, a crash he did not survive. Officers were working that scene, and four lanes had been closed behind flares and cones, the standard way to shield responders from traffic moving at freeway speed. The Tesla driver was 22 and from Sacramento.
According to the CHP account reported by Electrek, the Tesla arrived at freeway speed, passed through the closure and struck the Charger with both officers inside. Cameras on the patrol car and on another vehicle recorded the impact, and the agency released dashcam video of the collision on Thursday. Both crashes remain under investigation. The CHP has not said which Tesla model was involved or which software version it was running, and the vehicle logs that could show what the system was doing in the minutes beforehand have not been made public. Until those logs are produced, the sleeping-driver account stands as a claim rather than a finding.
The California Highway Patrol’s position on driver duty
The agency’s statement stressed that FSD is a driver-assistance feature that depends on an alert, in-control person behind the wheel. It added a line that now frames the case: “Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles.” The product is branded FSD (Supervised) and relies on a cabin camera to check attention, warn the driver and disengage if the warnings go ignored. A driver who is truly asleep is exactly the situation that monitoring is meant to catch, which is why the data from the car matters so much.
Electrek’s reporting adds that Tesla has been relaxing that monitoring and that drivers can bypass it, with a dollar bill placed in front of the camera reportedly nullifying the check, a practice it describes in a separate report. None of that has been tied to the Fairfield crash.
Federal scrutiny of Teslas striking emergency vehicles
Regulators have seen this pattern before. In August 2021 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation after a string of Teslas using Autopilot struck stopped police cars and fire trucks, many of them at night near flares, cones and flashing lights. Electrek’s coverage at the time counted 11 crashes involving parked emergency vehicles. The probe led to Tesla’s December 2023 recall of more than 2 million vehicles, remedied with an over-the-air update that added driver-attention alerts.
The recall did not end federal interest. In May 2024 the agency opened recall query RQ24009 to test whether the fix worked, and its information request to Tesla cited 20 crashes in vehicles that already had the remedy installed. NHTSA’s test center found no difference in when the warning sequence began before and after the update when the camera was obscured, and the agency noted that Tesla changed the sensitivity of the monitoring after launch. The letter defined the subject vehicles as all Tesla models from model years 2014 to 2024 carrying the system and posed 17 requests covering crash data, the recall decision and use of the cabin camera.
Liability and the limits of supervised driving
Courts and critics are now testing who carries the blame when a supervised system fails. Florida’s $243 million Autopilot judgment assigned a third of the blame to Tesla, and Electrek has argued that the company’s naming and marketing of the system share responsibility with the people behind the wheel. In December 2025, Elon Musk said FSD users could text and drive depending on traffic context, a claim that runs against California’s ban on texting while driving. Electrek also reports that Tesla agreed this month to drop the Full Self-Driving name in Europe after German regulators called it misleading.
Other cases show the same complacency problem. A Tesla on FSD hit a parked police car in Fullerton in June 2024 while officers handled a fatal crash, and that driver admitted being on his phone. A Katy, Texas, FSD crash earlier this year drew similar criticism. In Fairfield the open question is narrower and answerable: whether Tesla’s logs show FSD was active, and for how long, before a car carrying a 22-year-old reached a closed freeway lane at speed.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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