Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O’Dowd analyses Elon Musk’s attempts to shut down NHTSA investigations by culling its staff. Dan’s comments were published in The Register on 11 April 2025, and can be read here.
Dan O’Dowd commented: “The car is terrible, it will try to kill you. We’ve written multiple reports to NHTSA to show it. We’ve offered to help. They want to reproduce it, and we show them how to do it. And nothing happens, not a thing. No investigation, no improvement, no fixing of the problem.”
One of the major problems with FSD’s design, in Dan O’Dowd’s view, is that it is the only ADAS in production that is not equipped with LiDAR to scan the road for real-time data of the vehicle’s surroundings. Instead, Tesla’s systems take a vision-only approach.
Dan O’Dowd further commented that he is not confident that Tesla will face any further scrutiny, now that NHTSA has been made less powerful.