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Tesla has come under fire again for its controversial Full Self-Driving driver assistance feature, this time in ads that aired Sunday in Washington, DC, as well as in several state capitals during Super Bowl LVII.
The spot shows a number of situations where a Tesla allegedly operating in FSD mode failed, with examples including a car crossing into the oncoming lane and hitting a doll imitating children crossing a road.
The commercial was produced by The Dawn Project, an organization that aims to ensure software security in critical situations. The ad was also posted on Saturday by tech entrepreneur Dan O’Dowd on his Twitter account, along with a request by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ban FSD on public roads. The agency has so far only opened an investigation following a series of accidents involving Tesla and emergency vehicles.
O’Dowd, who founded The Dawn Project, is a software engineer who develops software that he says never fails and can’t be hacked. Some of the software he has developed has been used by the military, as well as NASA. He also founded and runs a company called Green Hills Software, which works with companies in the automotive industry to ensure the safe adoption of self-driving technology.
However, despite what its name alludes to, FSD does not allow the car to drive itself. The feature, which is an improvement over the more basic driver-assist Autopilot feature, can handle certain situations but requires the driver to be monitoring things around the clock and always ready to correct errors.
The ad calling for a ban on FSD comes just weeks after the US Department of Justice requested documents from Tesla regarding Autopilot and FSD. The head of the National Transportation Safety Board also called FSD “misleading and irresponsible” in 2021, and California deemed it illegal.
Tesla has promised that the FSD will eventually be able to operate the vehicle without anyone having to be in it, but while the company continues to update the FSD’s capabilities, several disgruntled Tesla customers filed a class action lawsuit against the automaker last year over the failure. provide a fully functional system. Tesla’s lawyers later reportedly argued that the failure to deliver the self-driving car was not fraud, and called for the lawsuit to be dropped.
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