Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O’Dowd has been interviewed by Tesla Motors Club podcast, discussing The Dawn Project’s recent testing of Tesla Full Self-Driving and the critical safety defects these tests have revealed.
Dan’s interview was published on 23 October 2023, and can be found here.
Dan commented that: “The two biggest threats that I see in terms of catastrophic results are the power grid and self-driving cars. It’s not just that they can cause a great catastrophe, it’s that they’re so easily programmed…I’m saying we’ve got to slow down if you want to put something like a car on the internet you really need to use software that nobody can hack.”
“People say it’s a Beta. This product is not a Beta. Let me explain the engineering process to anybody who doesn’t know. You build a product, you prototype it in a lab. You think it’s working pretty well and you send it to Alpha site. Alpha – which is your own employees, who take the product home and use it and tell you all the problems and tell you bugs and how it’s used and all that stuff. That’s the Alpha testing process.”
“You keep doing Alpha testing until you can’t find bugs anymore. You keep doing it until the employees are saying you know, this thing’s working pretty well. So long as the employees are finding so many bugs that they overwhelm the developers, they can’t fix them that fast, you stay in the alpha process of your own employees and not the outside world. When you finally get it to where the employees are saying: “I like it, it’s good, it doesn’t break down on me all the time,” then you send it to beta site. This product, you cannot use it for ten minutes, and not find – I will make a caveat: on the freeway, way better – but in town, in real driving, in real cities, with stop lights and pedestrians and other cars and having to turn right and all those things, you know, Elon went out for a drive, live streamed it, and at minute 20 it tried to run a red light!”
“They say it was going to be the end of the year, people say well they get eventually, no they don’t. They haven’t gotten it and some people bought it back in 2016 and they’re waiting 7 years and they haven’t got what they paid for after seven years! Are these things lies? The Paint it Black video is a lie. I’m sorry. He told his engineers to develop a video to show how great full self driving is going to be someday. He told them I know it doesn’t do all those thing, he told them fill in all the things it can’t do. They built that video and they send it to him and he says ‘what’s all these jump cuts? Make it look like one continuous run.’ We have all the emails for this, he told them to do that and then he said, ‘Yeah, i want you to put something on the front, a big black thing, a disclaimer-like warning that says the driver is only there for legal reasons he’s not touching the steering wheel and the car is driving itself.’ Then he put out a tweet saying, ‘here’s self-driving, here’s self-driving’. There’s no indication this was a concept at all. He put it out as the fact of what it did.”
“We ran that route a few months ago. It can’t do that today. We ran it four times – it failed every single time. It still can’t even do that route from that place – we found that place where it started to Tesla headquarters, it still can’t park itself. The whole thing was a total fake and Elon Musk ordered the whole thing and we have everything in writing and in testimony and lawsuits now. That was seven years ago. Faked the whole thing from beginning to end.”