‘Don’t be a Tesla… dummy': Ad in newspaper criticizes Autopilot software

EV giant Tesla has become a ‘love it or hate it’ brand with some who are its die-hard fans while some who are die-hard critic of the company. One such person who belong to the ‘hate it’ group has given a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, calling out the company's Autopilot self-driving software.

The ad says, 'Don't be a Tesla crash test dummy' and has been attributed to The Dawn Project advocacy group. The leader of this group is Dan O’Dowd, who also also happens to be the CEO of Green Hills Software - a company that specializes in automotive software and recently came to light for its contribution to the BMW iX at CES 2022. The company is also working towards bringing a self-driving tech to the market as well, and its software suite is called ‘INTEGRITY’.

The newspaper ad brings to readers' attention that about every 36 minutes, “Tesla Full Self-Driving commits an unforced error that if not corrected by a human would likely cause a collision". This is just one of a series of the claims that company makes about Tesla's Autopilot system. “We did not sign up our families to be crash test dummies for thousands of Tesla cars being driven on the public roads by the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company," the ad read.

The advertisement further informed readers that The Dawn Project is organizing the opposition to Elon Musk's ill-advised Full Self-Driving robot car experiment. The project aims to remove Tesla vehicles from the road unless they ‘have 1,000 times fewer critical malfunctions’. The group further mentioned its analysis of having Tesla's Autopilot-run cars on roads and how they are a hazard to human life.

O’Dowd is so confident about his group's claims that the ad also offers a $10,000 reward to the first person who can “name another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes".