The tech CEO behind a Super Bowl ad attacking Teslas as unsafe declared partial victory after Elon Musk’s self-driving technology was found by a government agency to increase risks of a collision.
Dan O’Dowd of Green Hills Software, who spent $600,000 for 30 seconds of air time in certain regional markets, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall of Tesla’s cars equipped with its self driving software proved he was right. But the businessman blasted the proposed regulatory fix as “woefully inadequate.”
“We’re glad that Tesla has finally acknowledged that the flaws we found in our tests are true and real,“ O’Dowd said in a statement on Thursday. “To that extent, we have achieved our goal.”
On Wednesday, NHTSA published a report saying Tesla had agreed to a recall virtually all 362,758 vehicles vehicles that had Full Self-Driving (FSD), the $15,000 optional package that includes its most advanced feature.
In addition to hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the U.S., another 20,667 were reportedly affected in Canada. This constitutes the overwhelming bulk of approximately 400,000 cars across both countries that had FSD Beta enabled, according to Tesla.
This week’s recall is the single greatest instance of regulatory enforcement taken against FSD to date. A smaller February 2022 recall was issued to fix a rolling stop, when only about 60,000 cars had the developmental software installed.
While further regulatory action cannot be excluded, NHTSA’s immediate criticism of the system was limited to just a few specific traffic situations and not FSD’s performance more broadly.
Investigation remains ‘open and active’
The U.S. traffic safety authority concluded that Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD were “unsafe around intersections” and behave in certain cases “without due caution.”
The precise nature of the problem as described by NHTSA included numerous…