A sade-technology advocacy group announced that Teslas’s full self-driving option is a huge threat to younger pedestrians. They said that while investigating, Tesla’s self-driving software was unable to detect child-sized mannequins and hit many mannequins, and the credibility of the world’s largest electric car-making company is under suspicion.
The Dawn Project also conducted a safety test on the Tesla Full Self-Driving(FSD) and also came up with the same conclusion that FSD was hitting stationery kid-sized mannequins in its path. The Dawn Project has now pressurized congress to ban the Tesla auto-driving technology and has declared it a public threat.
The FSD was launched by Tesla in June and Elon Musk flooded the internet with its praises and said that “Tesla’s Full Self-Driving is ‘amazing’ ”. But Dan O’Dowd, founder of the Dawn Project, claims that the results of the test were “deeply disturbing” and answering Musk’s claim he said, “It’s not. It’s a lethal threat to all Americans”.
O’Dowd further added that “Over 100,000 Tesla drivers are already using car’s FSD mode on public roads, putting children at great risk in communities across the country and it will not mow down children on the sidewalks.”
The first incident has already occurred in 2021 during the colossal crash in Texas which ended up killing two people. Musk’s response in this matter was cold as he tweeted that “a less sophisticated version of FSD was not switched on at the moment of collision.”
The authorities also didn’t act as actively as they should have been and the case was swept under the rug. Tesla got away with it by just publishing on their site that “current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA) also carried out an investigation in June. They tested 830,000 Tesla cars and found out that there has been a pattern of crashing occurring in the crashes involving Tesla cars and its FSD.
Since 2019, 19 deaths have occurred in the crashes which involved Tesla’s auto-driving mode and 273 other crashes with severe injuries and just as many that were not reported. Tesla’s and Musk’s promises have continued to disappoint users for many years but most of the time he gets away with it.
