Federal safety regulators are looking into a late-night crash on Interstate 80 in Northern California in which, authorities say, a Tesla driver fell asleep with driver-assistance software engaged and slammed into a California Highway Patrol car, seriously injuring the two officers inside. NBC News reported Friday, Oct. 16, that regulators said they were investigating.

The 22-year-old driver from Sacramento told CHP officers at the scene that he had been asleep while using Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature, according to CHP accounts reported by KQED and CBS Sacramento. Nobody has yet confirmed that the system was actually on. NBC Bay Area said it was unknown whether FSD was active, and CHP plans to download the car's data and onboard video, KQED reported.

What happened on I-80

The crash happened just before midnight on Tuesday, Oct. 13, on eastbound I-80 west of Air Base Parkway in Fairfield, in Solano County. Officers were already working a fatal crash from about an hour earlier and had closed four lanes with flares and cones, CBS Sacramento reported. According to CHP, the Tesla came into the closure at freeway speed and hit the back of a parked Dodge Charger patrol car with two officers sitting in it.

Dashcam footage released by CHP on Thursday shows the Tesla passing the flares and cones before the impact. Two other officers standing behind the patrol car ran clear, KQED reported. The two officers in the car spent the night in a Fairfield hospital and were released the next day. Investigators said the driver was not impaired; he had minor injuries, according to CBS Sacramento. CHP has not released the Tesla's model or software version, Electrek noted.

"It's pretty alarming," CHP Sgt. Andrew Barclay told KQED. He said there is no specific law that makes sleeping while using the system its own crime, but CHP could ask the California DMV to revoke the driver's license, and the DMV can act on its own. "Everything is on the table at the moment," Barclay said.

What Tesla's system is, and isn't

CHP used the crash to make a point about the product's name. "Despite its name, Full Self-Driving is not fully autonomous," the agency said, describing it as an SAE Level 2 driver-assistance system that needs constant supervision. "Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles," CHP added.

Tesla's own website says the features now enabled "require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous," KQED noted. Tesla did not respond to KQED's request for comment. The current version, FSD (Supervised), uses the cabin camera to check that the driver is watching the road and is designed to warn and then disengage if the driver is not paying attention, Electrek reported. Electrek also said drivers have found ways around that monitoring, such as covering the camera.

The question of sleeping drivers was already on the table. An NBC News investigation in August found at least 43 online videos showing people apparently asleep while their Teslas drove, and in September Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, asked the administration to look into drivers who deliberately fall asleep at the wheel.

Part of a longer federal look at Tesla

Crashes into stopped emergency vehicles have drawn scrutiny before. Regulators opened an investigation in August 2021 after a series of Teslas on Autopilot hit police cars and fire trucks, many of them at night at scenes lit with flares and cones, Electrek noted. That probe ended in December 2023 with a recall of more than 2 million vehicles and an over-the-air update that added driver-attention alerts. In June 2024, a Tesla on FSD struck a parked police car in Fullerton, California, while officers handled a fatal crash; that driver admitted he was on his phone.

Separately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration upgraded its review of how FSD handles reduced camera visibility to an engineering analysis in March, after counting nine crashes, Transport Topics reported. That step can lead to a recall. Tesla, which this month agreed to drop the Full Self-Driving name in Europe, still sells the feature under that name in the U.S.

For now the Fairfield case rests on the driver's own account. The car's logs should show whether FSD was engaged and whether it warned him before the crash, and both crashes on I-80 that night remain under investigation.