Tesla Driver Says He Was Asleep on FSD Before Hitting a CHP Patrol Car; Federal Regulators Investigate

It’s the kind of crash driver-assistance critics have warned about for years. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, a Tesla drove into a parked California Highway Patrol car on Interstate 80 in Fairfield, California. The driver later told officers he was asleep while using Full Self-Driving, KQED reports.

What happened

CHP officers were already on the scene of an earlier fatal crash near Air Base Parkway, with several lanes closed. Dashcam footage released by CHP on Thursday shows the Tesla speeding past road flares and cones before hitting the back of a patrol car. Two officers standing behind it ran out of the way. The two officers inside were seriously injured; they spent the night in hospital and were released the next day.

The 22-year-old driver from Sacramento had minor injuries and was not under the influence, according to CHP.

Federal regulators step in

On Friday, federal safety regulators said they were investigating the crash, NBC News reports. CHP will download the car’s data and onboard video. It is holding the driver, not Tesla, responsible, and could ask the DMV to revoke his license. “There’s no specific law that says if you sleep while operating a full self-driving vehicle, this is the crime,” CHP Sgt. Andrew Barclay told KQED.

A familiar pattern

As The Verge recalls, NHTSA opened an Autopilot investigation in 2021 after a series of crashes into parked emergency vehicles. A 2023 update added more alerts, and regulators later opened another probe into whether that fix went far enough. Tesla did not respond to KQED; its website says current features “require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

CHP put it plainly: “Despite its name, Full Self-Driving is not fully autonomous. It is an SAE Level 2 driver assistance system that requires continuous driver supervision.”

Rocks take

FSD can be impressive, but it is still a Level 2 system: you are the driver, at every second. Driver monitoring is supposed to stop exactly this scenario, so the investigation should tell us whether the car warned him and how long it kept driving. We’ll follow it.