Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Aug. 25 to respond to a screenshot posted by Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) of a blog post from The Dawn Project’s website written by the safety group’s CEO and founder Dan O’Dowd.
“Bat s**t crazy,” Musk replied using emojis.
Musk’s response was the latest punch thrown in an ongoing scrap between Musk and Tesla with the safety advocacy group. This dispute appears to have kicked off on Aug. 9 when The Dawn Project released a national TV campaign showing a white Tesla EV, operating on full self-driving (FSD) software, run over a child-sized mannequin in the middle of a street multiple times.
The Back Drop: In response to the Dawn Projects blog post, on Aug. 11 Tesla sent the group a cease and desist letter, asking that, among other things, the videos and other “defamatory information” be removed.
“To be clear, FSD Beta incorporates safety by design and does recognize pedestrians, including children, and when utilized properly, the system reacts to prevent or mitigate a collision,” explained the letter, which was signed by Dinna Eskin, senior director and deputy general counsel for Tesla.
O’Dowd’s group has shown no signs of being deterred. On Aug. 15, O’Dowd took to Twitter to poke the bear by posting another version of the video to Musk's personal account with the caption: “New video of Master Scammer Musk's Full Self-Driving @Tesla ruthlessly mowing down a child mannequin wearing a safety vest in a real school crosswalk. No cones. Room to swerve. Video of pedals. Everything is real except the child, bc you know what would happen to a real child!”
The Response: On Aug. 25, O’Dowd published a blog post on his website, hitting back at Elon Musk and his lawyers over the cease and desist letter. In the post, O’Dowd counters much of Tesla’s letter line-by-line while periodically adding verbiage in the form of personal attacks: O’Dowd refers to the Tesla CEO as a crybaby, to Musk’s stockholders as fanboys and added Musk’s lawyers made him look like a doofus.
“The rest of the letter is boring standard legal boilerplate,” O’Dowd added before finishing the post off with a threat: “Tesla Full Self-Driving software has no future. It is the most incompetently designed, implemented, and tested commercial software I have ever seen. All it does is take a perfectly good Tesla car and make it occasionally try to kill the driver, the passengers, and innocent bystanders. I dare you to come out and defend this technology.”
Originally published on Aug. 25, 2022.
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