TESLA CEO Elon Musk has responded to an ad taken out in Sunday’s New York Times that presents Teslas as dangerous.
Musk called the full-page ad, which slams Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology as faulty, a “tragic case of ego [over] ability.”
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The ad was taken out by tech founder Dan O’Dowd through his Dawn Project initiative and described users of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech as “crash-test dummies.”
The ad also offered $10,000, the same price as FSD software on a Tesla, to the first person who could name “another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes.”
The move by O’Dowd has been criticized by some as a publicity stunt to draw attention to his own automotive software company, Green Hills Software, which announced at CES it was teaming up with BMW’s iX vehicle.
However, O’Dowd tweeted that his intentions behind placing the ad were to campaign “to ban @Tesla full self-driving from our roads.”
O’Dowd also condemned Tesla in his tweet as “@ElonMusk’s ill-advised full self-driving robot car experiment.”
Musk replied directly to O’Dowd’s tweet on Sunday, calling Green Hills Software “a pile of trash.”
Putting the competitive nature between the two automotive software companies aside, Tesla’s FSD has been no stranger to controversy.
Just earlier this week, two felony charges were filed against the owner of a Tesla Model S for a deadly crash in 2019 that involved the vehicle’s Autopilot system.
On top of that, FSD has been criticized as both misleading in its description and potentially dangerous, prompting the California Department of Motor Vehicles to review Tesla’s FSD to determine its future use.
FSD is currently an optional add-on that allows Teslas to park, change lanes, enter and exit highways, and recognize stop signs without human interference.
Despite its name, the technology does not make cars fully autonomous, and critics and experts have expressed concern that it might be enabling drivers to pay less attention while on the road.
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In other news, personalised smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers this year.
Tech giant Microsoft is trying to make the world more woke by rolling out an “inclusiveness” checker in its Word software.
And a federal anti-trust case against Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has been given the go-ahead.
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