When Dane O’Dowd had a mid-life crisis, he bought two near-identical Tesla Roadsters, the first models produced by the electric car maker.
This year the 66-year-old tech entrepreneur added another to his collection, a Model 3 equipped with full self-driving beta, a software program that allows the car to drive itself on highways and busy city streets.
The third Tesla is the key to an unusual hobby: O’Dowd is leading a multimillion-dollar campaign to get Tesla’s full self-driving software off the roads before Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally takes the technology to the world Is.
O’Dowd, who made his fortune selling software for military customers, is using the Model 3 to test and film the self-driving software. They have documented what appear to be instances of a car crossing the center line towards oncoming traffic.This summer, he caused an uproar by releasing a video that allegedly showed his Tesla in full self-driving mode mowing down child-sized mannequins.
If Tesla gets away with this and ships this product and I can’t convince the public that a self driving car that drives like a drunk 13 year old suicide shouldn’t be on the street where Glass Case NASA their The collection displays ancient coins and souvenirs purchased from auctions from the Moon missions.
How auto regulators played mind games with Elon Musk O’Dowd ran nationwide TV ads with the video and even ran an unsuccessful campaign for the US Senate as part of his one-man crusade, which he Watch as the cavalier evolution of dangerous technology.
To O’Dowd and other skeptics, the program is a deadly experiment imposed on an unsuspecting public — a view underscored by a recently filed class-action lawsuit and a Justice Department report into Tech. Despite a high-profile campaign and concern from some regulators and politicians, Tesla is forging ahead with claims that the technology will change the world.
The company and its supporters argue that their approach will help usher in a future in which human error deaths on the roads are eliminated. In late September, during a four-hour event in which Tesla demonstrated its latest artificial intelligence technology.
Elon Musk said that full self-driving is already saving lives and it would be morally wrong to keep it off public roads. At what point do you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, Elon Musk said to Musk.
Even if you have been tried and convicted by many people. Elon Musk and Tesla, which typically do not respond to media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.
Elon Musk’s Trump-style management has upset Twitter employees awaiting layoffs. He now owns and runs Twitter on top of running Tesla and his other companies SpaceX and Neuralink.
Elon Musk has also roped in Tesla engineers to help him work on Twitter. O’Dowd’s discovery has prompted personal attacks and criticism from legions of Musk’s supporters. Tesla sent a cease-and-desist letter to O’Dowd in response to the test of his child mannequin.
This week O’Dowd said he tried to run a new ad on Twitter that was rejected. But Tesla fans aren’t his only critics. Security experts have questioned whether rogue independent testing is the right way to promote tougher regulation.
They are doing it on public roads. It still raises the same ethical issues that you’re putting other people at non-consenting risk, said Phil Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied autonomous car safety for years.
Lucia Sanchez, a spokeswoman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said consumers should never attempt to create their own test scenarios.