Dan O’Dowd and his association The Dawn Project have launched a new offensive against Tesla with a potentially misleading advertisement, broadcast during the advertising pages of the Super Bowl.
This Sunday February 12 was perhaps not the best evening for Elon Musk. On the one hand, his favorite American football team lost the Super Bowl final, but in addition, Tesla suffered a new attack through an incriminating advertisement against Tesla aired during the Super Bowl from its main detractor Dan O’Dowd. The head of the association The Dawn Project wants to ban Tesla’s Full Self Driving. This is therefore the second targeted attack against the autonomous driving system developed by Tesla that the American manufacturer has had to deal with in just over 6 months.
The detractor has again put significant resources into getting his message across, particularly acerbic, against the technology deployed by Tesla. Except that once again, it is very likely that Dan O’Dowd lied in his video, betting on an audience partially won over to his cause among the spectators of the Super Bowl final. That’s ugly!
An advertisement broadcast during the most watched event on television in the USA
An advertisement broadcast nationally, during one of the many advertising breaks for the sporting event of the year, is a budget that can exceed 20 million dollars for 30 seconds of advertisements. With a poor quality video, which looks homemade, it was surprising that the association had spent so much on this operation. Generally, it is the big brands that invest in the event’s advertising slots, given the colossal investment that this represents.
In fact, the advertisement was broadcast only on the slots reserved for local advertisements. According to CNN, it bet on several strategic geographical sectors only: Washington DC, Austin, Tallahassee, Albany, Atlanta. So, instead of spending tens of millions, the association only paid $600,000 (about 562,000 euros), the buzz that then follows on social networks makes it possible to reach a much wider audience at lower cost.
Is the content of the ad true or again manipulated?
We are not the last to criticize the faults of the autonomous driving developed by Tesla, but the methods employed by the association The Dawn Project are particularly unfair and very questionable.
Their first video, released in August, was debunked. If Dan O’Dowd assures that the Full Self-Driving did indeed cause the collisions with the children, or rather the mannequins representing children, we can observe, on the various shots broadcast, that it is far from being really the case. We can therefore leave with many prejudices about this new advertising.
Several elements of this new video attract attention and suggest that, once again, they knowingly lied. While it is impossible to judge whether the autonomous driving was activated on the scenes outside the vehicle, for what is filmed from the cabin, there are several clues suggesting that the driver is overriding the system.
The sequence made with the Tesla passing the school bus seems false:
In the USA, you must give priority to school buses when it commits to resume its journey. There is also a “stop” sign that unfolds to indicate this. On this scene, we want to make believe that the Tesla is in autonomous driving and that it does not respect this traffic rule. It is possible that the FSD does not manage this situation well, we cannot judge without having tested it, except that if we look at the side of the GPS, no destination/route is indicated. The car is therefore probably only with the adaptive cruise control activated and not the FSD (full autonomous driving).
For the sequence with the road closed by the works, a fairly similar observation
Apparently a good part of the videos were made with the FSD version 10.12.2, a version released in the summer of 2022, which has already evolved several times. On this scene, two things attract our attention, but do not allow us to verify what was actually asked of the car. On the one hand, no indication of the direction or the next course change is indicated, which is normally not the case. On the other hand, we see an alert message on the screen, but which is not really readable in the video.
These boxed messages appear over many clips of the video, which may suggest that the driver is violating the terms of use for autonomous driving and may mean that the system has been disabled. However, it is too difficult to distinguish with the quality of the video broadcast. We still compared the screen with a test video of the same version of the Tesla autonomous driving software, randomly taken from youtube.
Tesla’s self-driving is a big hit, there’s no doubt about it. It is also for this reason that the driver is asked to be always vigilant at the wheel. It’s still just a beta, available to only 400,000 US users, though that’s no excuse. Except that the advertisement broadcast on February 12 necessarily manipulates the viewer, it is in any case necessarily unfair: use of an old version of the software, FSD which does not seem activated, alert message which may mean a disconnected system always visible on the screen. With these remarks, advertising could revive a certain hatred towards the American manufacturer, and that is really not useful.
What message is Dan O’Dowd trying to convey?
The Tesla critic constantly seeks to ban Tesla’s self-driving system in the United States with active lobbying of politicians. He has however been accused of having a conflict of interest, because he also works with competing systems of Tesla, but Dan O’Dowd denies it.
The video also ends with a message displayed asking that the NHTSA, the American equivalent of traffic safety for highways, react: ” why does the NHTSA authorize Full Self-Driving? »
The advertisement multiplies shock phrases in 30 seconds:
- ” Full Self-Driving will run over a child on a crosswalk, suddenly change lanes into oncoming traffic, hit a baby in a stroller, ignore “do not enter” signs and even drive on the wrong side of the road “.
- ” Tesla’s self-driving is endangering the public with misleading marketing and woefully inefficient engineering. »
- ” 90% of people agree that the system should be banned immediately. »
We don’t really know who the “90%” are, but one thing is certain, Dan O’Dowd does not go with the back of the spoon when it comes to dragging Tesla through the mud. Which will certainly earn him a second letter from Tesla’s lawyers.
In the meantime, Elon mocked him on Twitter, as usual. Moreover, the tweet fact-checking tool was probably used more for Dan O’ Dowd’s post on Twitter than for Donald Trump’s posts. This is a particularly unlikely situation.
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