Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology has plenty of adversaries. One of those is Dan O’Dowd, a tech executive who owns a company that builds software that competes with FSD and is running for Senate. He and his Dawn Project initiative have just released a smear video purporting to show how dangerous FSD is. Unfortunately for O’Dowd, the video is full of inconsistencies.
FSD has been called out by numerous parties for everything from its nomenclature to its sometimes questionable decision-making processes on the real road. In fact, just this month, the Californian DMV filed a complaint about the language surrounding FSD saying that it’s “untrue or misleading.” The Dawn Project’s political opposition to the software is just one more voice in opposition to Tesla.
First spotted by the folks over at Electrek, O’Dowd’s “Test Track – The Dangers of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Software” video leaves us with more questions than answers. The main gist of the ad seems to be that FSD isn’t even capable of recognizing and stopping for a child in the middle of the road. Of course, we never see FSD activated in the video and that’s just the start of the problems here.
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After noticing that FSD was never engaged during the ad, Electrek reached out to the Dawn Project about the inconsistency. The response they received was an affidavit stating that the driver “believed FSD Beta was active.” That’s cool, but FSD is not active in the ad which is all that actually matters. Shortly thereafter, the Dawn Project released more footage that’s nowhere in the ad but does show FSD active.
Problem one is that the new footage looks like it might’ve been shot by a 3rd grader with a camcorder from the mid 1990s. Problem two is that the Dawn Project says that the lowest speed at which a test impact occurred was 24 mph but in the first supplemental video it released the car is traveling at under 20 mph when the impact occurs.
Problem three is that there are warnings popping up on the screen but they’re impossible to see due to the shaking and unprofessional camera work. One Twitter user had a plausible explanation: “There is definitely an unreadable warning message displayed at the bottom of the screen. It’s probably the one stating the accelerator pedal is pressed.”
It makes a lot of sense to be critical of FSD and all technologies like it but from everything we’re seeing here, this doesn’t look like a good-faith test.