Anti-Tesla ad airs during Super Bowl as part of Senate campaign

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) package is going to be the subject of a Super Bowl 2023 commercial. But not in the way you might think. It’s not actually an ad for the EVs, but an attack from a competitor who is also using it as part of a Senate run.

Dan O’Dowd is the CEO of Green Hills Software, which creates operating systems and programming tools for embedded systems. He’s also announced a Senate run in the state of California and is basing the campaign around a single issue — to get Tesla’s FSD banned from US roads.

He’s certainly not the first to have issues with FSD, particularly Tesla’s Beta products that largely leave customers responsible for the mistakes the EV makes. There are entire articles and videos dedicated to alleged Tesla FSD crashes.

But O’Dowd took this a step further by going after Tesla last year in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign called The Dawn Project. And because he’s engaging in a Senate run, the ads have political protection.

There are a few clips out there already, including compilations of FSD Beta driving tests that users already uploaded to YouTube.

But there was a bit of controversy when one of the videos claimed that the 10.12.2 version of the FSD software crashed into a child-size mannequin in tests conducted by O’Dowd’s team:

“Our safety test of the capability of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology to avoid a stationary mannequin of a small child has conclusively demonstrated that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software does not avoid the child or even slow down when a child-sized mannequin is in plain view,” the YouTube description reads.

But as Electrek reports, FSD wasn’t actually activated during this test.

O’Dowd goes after Tesla at the Super Bowl

Still, this hasn’t stopped O’Dowd from continuing this campaign during Super Bowl LVII, as reported by Electrek. And it’s a pricey expense with Statista estimating that companies are spending an average of US$7 million for 30-second ad slots this year.

“Watch The Dawn Project’s #Superbowl ad demonstrate critical safety defects in @Tesla Full Self-Driving. 6 months ago we reported FSD would run down a child. Tesla hasn’t even fixed that! To focus their attention, @NHTSAgov must turn off FSD until Tesla fixes all safety defects,” O’Dowd tweeted on Monday morning.

The accompanying video shows instances of Tesla FSD operating in ‘unsafe’ ways such as hitting strollers and a child mannequin and swerving onto the wrong side of the road.

“Tesla’s Full Self-Driving is endangering the public with deceptive marketing and woefully inept engineering,” the video says.

This tweet is followed by one of Twitter’s context boxes which flags O’Dowd’s competing technology as well as the debunking of the child mannequin claims.

“We publish footage of each test, including multiple angles showing controls not touched, and fanboys still confidently assert we faked them! To remove all doubt that these severe safety defects are real we invite @ElonMusk, @NHTSAgov, the media to witness a public demonstration,” O’Dowd said in a follow-up tweet.

Regardless of the validity of the claims and footage, what O’Dowd and the Dawn Project also fail to disclose in these videos is that Green Hills Software is working on its own competing self-driving technology. That doesn’t mean FSD is entirely safe but it’s important context.