Electrek.co
by Fred Lambert
A Tesla Full Self-Driving smear campaign started by a California billionaire running for Senate has a new attack ad based on a FSD Beta “test,” where they failed to realize they never engaged FSD Beta during the test.
Earlier this year, we reported on Dan O’Dowd, a self-described billionaire and founder of Green Hills Software, a privately owned company that makes operating systems and programming tools.
O’Dowd had launched a Senate campaign in his home state of California, but the tech executive made it quite clear that he is making it a single-issue campaign, and that issue is Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program.
The campaign, called The Dawn Project, released an ad titled “The Dangers of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Software”.
As the video and its description explain, O’Dowd’s team claims that this is a test of Tesla’s “latest version of Full Self-Driving Beta software (10.12.2),” where the system crashes into a child-size mannequin.
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.
However, there’s a real problem with the test: They never activated Tesla’s FSD Beta in the test.