Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O’Dowd comments on Elon Musk’s lies about Tesla Full Self-Driving in Forbes. Dan’s comments were published on 20 August 2025 and can be read here.
Dan O’Dowd commented: “Innocent people have paid for Elon Musk’s lies about Tesla’s self-driving software with their lives. Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by overhyping Tesla’s self-driving software and deceiving safety-conscious consumers about the software’s reliability. The Miami Jury was right to punish Musk and Tesla for their relentless lies and false promises about Tesla’s self-driving software.
“Tesla buries the truth deep in its owner’s manual, where it quietly admits that FSD is not autonomous and that buyers must be fully attentive and ready to take immediate action at all times. Owners are expected to dig through hundreds of pages of text to find this admission. When litigating FSD and Autopilot crashes, Tesla relies on the defense that FSD is just a level 2 ADAS, like any other adaptive cruise control, and that fault should lie solely with the human driver.
“But Tesla’s marketing of Full Self-Driving tells a different story. For the past nine years, Elon Musk and Tesla have deceived consumers by claiming that Teslas are fully self-driving and that using the software is 10x safer than driving manually.
“It is clear that FSD is a tale of two systems. Tesla lures safety-conscious consumers in with promises of an autonomous system far safer than a human driver. When the software causes a crash, Tesla backtracks, points to obscure lines in the owner’s manual and blames the hapless driver for its software’s safety critical error.”