Chinese Drivers Are Using Tiny Plastic Heads to Fool Tesla Autopilot Safeguards
What you’re actually buying is a tiny replica of The Rock's head, designed to sit above the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking an attentive driver is behind the wheel. I fell into a deep rabbit hole browsing ecommerce sites and online forums to learn more about where they came from. The figurines come in dozens of varieties, most depicting Hollywood or Chinese celebrities.
- ▪What you’re actually buying is a tiny replica of The Rock's head, designed to sit above the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking an attentive driver is behind the wheel.
- ▪I fell into a deep rabbit hole browsing ecommerce sites and online forums to learn more about where they came from.
- ▪The figurines come in dozens of varieties, most depicting Hollywood or Chinese celebrities.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 1 hour. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | WIRED |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-drivers-are-using-tiny-plastic-heads-to-fool-teslas-autopilot-safeguards/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:43:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-14T23:07:33.529Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-14T23:07:33.529Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XMXM3a-mnIjb · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Zeyi YangBusinessJun 12, 2026 1:57 PMChinese Drivers Are Using Tiny Plastic Heads to Fool Tesla’s Autopilot SafeguardsA cottage industry of celebrity figurines, blinking screens, and other DIY gadgets is helping drivers bypass Tesla's distracted-driving controls.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyIn China, for just $30, you can have Dwayne Johnson drive your Tesla for you. Sounds too cheap to be true? Well, it is. What you’re actually buying is a tiny replica of The Rock's head, designed to sit above the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking an attentive driver is behind the wheel.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED.
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