Tesla has become a love it or hate it brand for lots of car people. There’s no questioning how impressive some of their products are but Elon Musk tends to push the bleeding edge of technology like no other auto boss. That appetite for leading the technological charge forward is the subject of a new attack ad in the New York Times. The boss of the group in command of the attack just happens to be building competitive software.

That man is Dan O’Dowd who is the leader of the Dawn Project advocacy group and also happens to be the CEO of Green Hills Software. GHS specializes in all sorts of automotive software but most recently was noted for its contribution to the BMW iX at CES 2022. We’ll come back to them in just a moment but first let’s talk about the content of the full page ad that appeared on the New York Times and which you can see below or check out the actual newspaper ad here.

“If Full Self-Driving was full self-driving every car, millions would die every day.” and “About every 36 minutes, Tesla Full Self-Driving commits an unforced error that if not corrected by a human would likely cause a collision.” are just a couple of the melodramatic claims.

O’Dowd is so confident in his position that he’s offering a $10,000 “to the first person who can name another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes.”

Related: California’s DMV Reevaluating Stance On Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta

How did they come up with these figures? Well like any good expert they watched YouTube videos. How much YouTube you ask? A little more than seven grueling hours. That’s right, less than some of you have watched today.

In the videos, Dan’s group says that FSD committed a critical driving error about every 8 minutes and that’s not great but let’s be clear that these claims are by no stretch of the imagination definitive. First, that sample size is hilariously tiny. Second, we have no way of knowing how clips were chosen. Then, of course, there’s the source of the study.

Interestingly enough, It just so happens that Green Hills Software is working hard to bring self-driving tech to the market as well. A software suite that it calls INTEGRITY is one of its paramount products. On their site, they say “The INTEGRITY certified separation architecture isolates functions of mixed levels of criticality making it an ideal architecture for developers of automated driving systems.”

About that $10k prize

Remember that prize money that’s being offered if someone can prove that there’s a more defective product from another F500 company? Well, listen to this condition from the competition and let us know in the comments what you think of it. “If sponsor is unable to reproduce the results across sampled units of the product line, then the entry may be disqualified in sponsor’s sole and absolute discretion. Incomplete, false, misleading or deceptive entries will be disqualified at the sponsor’s sole and absolute discretion and may be removed.”

Some users on Twitter have called out O’Dowd and GHS for the obvious conflict of interest and while neither has directly responded at the time of this writing, Elon Musk sure had some choice words. “Green Hills software is a pile of trash. Linux ftw.” he said.

So if it feels like this is just some random attack from some unknown entity, then no, it seems to be an attack from the CEO of a competitor. At the same time, it’s important to note that FSD is indeed a beta product and while Tesla owners can opt to try out that software, they are in fact, submitting all the people around them on the road to that same testing. It’s not bad to point out the facts, but sometimes the source really detracts from the message.

Image credits The Dawn Project