Superbowl Ads Push for Tesla Boycott
During Super Bowl weekend on February 11th, at least two ads showing real crash footage of Teslas reportedly operating with the company’s Full Self-Driving software were pushed to audiences across the US - and were a continuation of an ongoing campaign to boycott Tesla products funded by tech billionaire Dan O’Dowd.
The ad campaign was expensive of course - O’Dowd’s company “The Dawn Project” paid a total of 552 thousand dollars to run them across several states. Last year, The Dawn Project ran similar ads for roughly the same amount in an effort to raise awareness about the safety issues of Tesla’s beta driver assistance software.
O’Dowd claims that his goal with The Dawn Project is to is to make software systems like Tesla’s FSD safer for humanity - and has been a staunch critic of Elon Musk’s company for some time as a result of these safety issues - even going so far as to make a Senate run in 2022 so that he could get cheaper air time for his anti-Tesla adds.
And sure, that definitely sounds like he has a pretty strong grudge against Musk and Tesla, but shockingly, there are even more holes in this story than that.
During that same Senate run in 2022,The Dawn Project released a test video of FSD in action, casually running over several child-sized mannequins - you may have seen the advertisements made with this footage.
However, even though the company claims that their test driver activated the system before the collisions, their own video shows that this wasn’t the case, and FSD was never turned on at all.
So, O’Dowd really seems to have it out for Tesla, and is spending lots of money for ads that don’t even properly show the supposed danger of FSD - the question is why?
Well, as it turns out, Mr. O’Dowd is also the proud CEO of Green Hills Software - which makes autonomous driving and piloting systems for vehicles. Yup, it’s the simplest reason of all - he’s a direct competitor.
Early video can be found of Green Hills Software marketing their autonomous driving software at tech shows - eventually landing a partnership with BMW themselves. The problem is, O’Dowd’s software is about as safe as he’s been saying the Tesla FSD is - with a particularly nasty fatal collision in Germany in August 2022 caused by complications arising from their autonomous system.
It’s not as though Tesla and their FSD software should be above criticism - but this is a clear case of a grudge from another, less-successful business - wasting money with disingenuous ads that are cashing in on public fears. O’Dowd clearly has a lot to gain from smearing Tesla.