Tesla is recalling 2,740,642 vehicles in China to strengthen driver monitoring on its assisted-driving system, after regulators found that checking for a hand on the wheel isn’t enough to keep drivers watching the road.

The fix forces Tesla to use the car’s cabin camera to track the driver’s eyes — the same kind of monitoring Chinese drivers were recently caught defeating with $20 plastic doll heads.

The recall covers 2,740,642 domestically built Model 3 and Model Y vehicles produced between March 4, 2019, and December 7, 2025, according to a filing with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).

The defect is about driver attention. When a vehicle is using Autosteer and enters “combination driving assistance” — China’s regulatory term for Level 2 systems — the regulator says Tesla’s “existing attention-monitoring mechanism is insufficient to provide the driver with alerts when their gaze leaves the road,” which increases the risk of a crash.

The remedy is an over-the-air software update. Per Tesla’s own recall notice, it will add “cabin-camera monitoring on the basis of the existing steering-wheel torque monitoring.” In plain terms, Tesla is going from checking whether your hands are on the wheel to also checking whether your eyes are on the road. The update is effective immediately.

The regulator’s problem is with the method. For the standard combination driving assistance in these cars, Tesla leaned on steering-wheel torque monitoring — a system that detects a hand nudging the wheel, not a driver actually looking at the road. SAMR ruled that insufficient.

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