Dan O’Dowd’s new American national ad campaign, launched as part of his California senate run, is called “Unsafe at Any Speed”. The ad features real- life moments where Tesla’s Full Self Driving software malfunctions, causing Tesla passengers and drivers to swear and cry out in fear.
O’Dowd’s background and knowledge of transportation technology and software is deep. Green Hills has built operating systems for NASA, Boeing, Airbus, and fighter jets for the U.S. military.
O’Dowd recently founded The Dawn Project to campaign for better software in safety-critical computer systems, and he is specifically targeting Elon Musk’s faulty fail-safe technology in a bid to be recognized as a “single issue” candidate in the California senate race.
In an interview with Politico he vowed to not talk about anything except Tesla’s dangerous self-driving technology during his campaign. A Dawn Project study of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving cars showed they malfunction on average every 8 minutes in city driving. “If a person drove that recklessly, they would fail their driver’s test, and if Full Self-Driving can’t pass the test, it should not be allowed to be driving on our roads,” says O’Dowd.
In addition, he says, “Connecting the power grid, hospitals, and millions of cars to the Internet with software riddled with bugs and security defects has turned these systems into potential weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hackers”.
