Our cars now have tons of software, which leads to another host of issues, but this one is funny, even if the person at the center of it doesn’t find it humorous in the least. Lexus has a safety feature that tracks a driver’s eyes and sends an alert if it thinks you’re drifting away or, worse, have your eyes closed. The problem with this story is that the safety system read an Asian man’s eyes as closed.
I’m not kidding. Lexus is a division of Toyota, so the Asian car company is allegedly racist toward Asian drivers. You simply cannot make this up, though the driver, who was driving a Lexus rental, might not have calibrated the systems properly (via Yahoo! Autos):
This Asian man got a loaner car from Lexus
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 31, 2026
The vehicle is equipped with new eye monitoring cameras to make sure you’re paying attention to the road. Only one problem
Because he’s Asian the Lexus registers his eyes as closed…. Many people believe this is racist
Apparently this… pic.twitter.com/R9jmERpLBF
The software compares your eye openness against a hard number. If your eyes naturally sit below that line — as they do for many people of Asian descent — the car flags you as impaired.
That's not malice. It's a calibration failure. Technical research on driver-monitoring systems describes eye-state detection using fixed metrics like eye aspect ratio, with a universal cutoff that doesn't account for natural variation in eye shape. When the training data under-represents certain facial phenotypes, the threshold becomes a liability.
The specific Lexus loaner anecdote can't be independently verified. What remains, though, is this: independent reporting and technical research have both confirmed that driver-monitoring systems produce false drowsiness alerts based on eye-shape variation. The failure mode is real, even if this particular story is murky.
It’s still a funny story; I’m sorry.
