Recent safety tests conducted by public safety advocacy group The
Dawn Project have demonstrated that Tesla Full Self-Driving is far
less safe than an average human driver, and still fails to
recognize a child crossing in a school crosswalk, despite Elon Musk
and Tesla fans claiming for years that Tesla’s self-driving
software is much safer than a human driver.
The Dawn Project’s tests have also proven that
FSD cannot complete a U-turn, leading to unpredictable and
dangerous situations for those in the vehicle. These tests have
since been validated by some of Tesla’s most devoted fans, despite
Musk proclaiming that data proves that Supervised Full Self-Driving
is safer than a human driver.
The Dawn Project has disproved a number of
claims made by Elon Musk and his fans, including Omar Qazi, who is
one of the most prolific and enthusiastic posters about Elon Musk,
Tesla, and Musk’s other companies. Qazi often reports on upcoming
products, features, release dates, and announcements before the
press. He regularly hosts Spaces discussions with other Musk fans
where he extolls the wonders of Tesla and Full Self-Driving, and
boasts about using FSD nearly 100% of the time. He was one of the
first FSD Beta testers and has published thousands of hours of
footage of FSD driving his Tesla around San Francisco and Los
Angeles. He recently said that FSD is “doing all of my
driving.”
The Dawn Project’s tests have further been
validated by Elon Musk announcing on August 11th 2023 that
Tesla was rewriting the software which he had previously lauded,
and Qazi more recently acknowledging that the previous version of
the software had been unsafe, and should be pulled off the roads,
despite also previously praising the very same software.
As The Dawn Project has demonstrated, Tesla’s
defective FSD software is still not safe for public roads, further
highlighting the dangers of Tesla’s decision to release previous
versions, which are now acknowledged as being even more dangerous
than this version, to untrained consumers on public roads. The Dawn
Project’s tests further highlight the contradiction between the
promotion of FSD by Tesla enthusiasts, with the unsafe and reckless
driving by the system.
Despite protests that FSD should be taken off
the market, and The Dawn Project’s attempts to inform Tesla and the
public of these dangers, Tesla has continued to sell defective
self-driving software to safety conscious consumers, telling them
it would make their families four times safer.
Even Tesla executives, such as Tesla’s former VP
of Policy and Business Development, Rohan Patel, who has been a
vocal supporter of FSD and has promoted FSD as a safety feature to
potential customers and regulators claiming that it would make
their families safer, admitted that even he wasn’t comfortable with
his own family using v11.
Research from The Dawn Project has further shown
that hundreds of thousands of people who paid up to $15,000 for FSD
only use it 15% of the time, indicating that these users do not
agree that FSD is safer than driving manually. The danger of
Tesla’s self-driving software has also been shown by the
experiences of customers such as Steve Wozniak, who reported that
Tesla’s self-driving software phantom braked “a hundred times” and
“lurched towards” a semi. Wozniak asserted that his self-driving
Tesla tried to kill him at every chance it could.
New data from NHTSA estimates that Tesla didn’t
count 82% of police reported crashes involving its self-driving
software, by only counting crashes in which airbags were deployed.
The real number of self-driving Tesla crashes is therefore more
than five and a half times higher than Tesla reported in its
Vehicle Safety Report.
Despite NHTSA pointing out that Tesla fails to
account for the accidents involving its self-driving software,
Tesla continues to use this discredited data to deceive the public
into believing that their self-driving technology is safer than
driving manually. Tesla is also under investigation by NHTSA over
its self-driving software's involvement in numerous crashes with
emergency vehicles.
When all of the Tesla crashes are counted, the
data is unequivocal that supervised Full Self-Driving is far less
safe than a human driving by themselves.
NHTSA’s explanation of Tesla’s data corroborates
The Dawn Project’s research and analysis which has found that
engaging Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software is much less safe than
a human driving by themselves.
The Dawn Project has proven that Tesla Full
Self-Driving can’t pass a DMV driver’s test, meaning that it is a
worse driver than a 16 year old with a license. The Dawn Project
has further demonstrated that FSD will still blow past a stopped
school bus with its red lights flashing and stop sign extended and
run down a child in a school crosswalk, and that FSD doesn’t
understand Do Not Enter and Road Closed signs. Sometimes it
inexplicably slams on the brakes for no reason. Tesla warns that
FSD “can suddenly swerve even when driving conditions appear normal
and straight-forward.”
Tesla claims that its self-driving software does
not make the vehicle autonomous and that the driver must be ready
to take over to correct FSD’s mistakes immediately. However,
research has shown that the only way to ensure a driver is paying
attention is to implement an effective driver monitoring system.
The Dawn Project’s tests have shown that Tesla’s driver monitoring
system is entirely unfit for purpose, endangering road users by
failing to ensure that the driver is paying attention when
operating Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. NHTSA has recently
confirmed The Dawn Project’s findings, describing Tesla’s driver
monitoring system as “weak” in its most recent recall.
NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety
Board have both rebuked Tesla for failing to disable Autopilot on
roads where Tesla knows it isn’t safe. To this day, Tesla continues
to ignore these safety recommendations.
One of the most commonly used arguments by FSD
fans to justify allowing defective self-driving software on public
roads is that it will save millions of lives in the future, so it
doesn’t matter if it kills a few people today. Despite this, The
Dawn Project has demonstrated that FSD continues to endanger lives
on the road, rather than showing any rate of improvement to
eventually be at a level where it can save lives.
Consumers, regulators, and law enforcement have
been misled about the safety of FSD, while FSD supporters continue
to promote the latest version of the software with the same
enthusiasm and praise that they gave the previous versions that
they now admit were unsafe. It will only be a matter of time before
the next version of FSD is released and the supporters admit that
v12 is also unsafe and should be prohibited on public roads.
As The Dawn Project’s recent testing has
demonstrated, FSD must be taken off public roads until it is proven
to be safe by independent third parties, rather than biased Tesla
enthusiasts. The Dawn Project has demonstrated that Tesla cannot be
trusted to self-certify the software and the safety claims they
make about it.
Source: Dan O’Dowd, Founder of
The Dawn Project
Contact:
Dan O’Dowd
Founder of The Dawn Project
info@dawnproject.com