Tesla Gears To Pull Crash-Test Videos Of Cars On Kid-Sized Dummies From Internet
Tesla is on a mission to take down a safety campaign showing one of its cars running over a child-sized dummy.
In a cease and desist letter first uncovered by the Washington Post, the automaker has warned The Dawn Project to remove all instances of the advertisement from the internet.
In the clip, a child-sized dummy dressed up in a T-shirt and shorts is standing at the end of a driveway as a Tesla Model 3 rams into it in a head-on collision going at 20 miles per hour with FSD on.
Our new safety test of @ElonMusk’s Full Self-Driving Teslas discovered that they will indiscriminately mow down children.
— Dan O'Dowd (@RealDanODowd) August 9, 2022
Today @RealDawnProject launches a nationwide TV ad campaign demanding @NHTSAgov ban Full Self-Driving until @ElonMusk proves it won’t mow down children. pic.twitter.com/i5Jtb38GjH
According to The Dawn Project, a safety advocacy group founded by billionaire Dan O’Dowd, the video was created to illustrate the harmful effects of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature and the implications should it be provided to all its cars.
As of right now, the autonomous driving feature is an add-on that drivers can purchase for US$12,000, or a monthly subscription of US$199.
However, Tesla told Electrek that FSD had, in fact, not been used during the filming of the video.
Some Tesla fans even took to defending the company themselves by posting videos of their own children standing in front of the car as they put their vehicles into FSD mode.
The videos became enough of a worry that the National Highway Traffic Safety had to step in and issue a warning to stop people from putting their kids in danger. Despite this, Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to assure users that autopilot makes cars “unequivocally safer.”
Essentially, passive Autopilot (car intervenes only when crash probability is high) cuts crashes in half.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 17, 2021
Active Autopilot (car is driving itself) cuts crashes in half again.
Doesn’t mean there are no crashes, but, on balance, Autopilot is unequivocally safer.
While FSD may sound like a fully automated feature, the company still states that drivers must be ready to take over the wheel at any moment should something happen on the roads. Hence, the name is a bit of a misdirect, and that’s where the problem truly lies.
Previously, a potential ruling by the state of California also seeks to ban the FSD system as it blames Tesla for falsely advertising to its customers its full capabilities.
[via Futurism and Gizmodo, cover image via The Dawn Project]
