Boycott Tesla : This year’s Super Bowl criticism of Tesla comes from someone who has done so for the past two years.
You might have seen several advertisements for Tesla during this year’s Super Bowl if you watched it in California, Delaware, Michigan, or Washington, D.C.No, Elon Musk’s electric car business wasn’t being advertised in the ads. The advertisements, on the other hand, explicitly urged viewers to “Boycott Tesla.”
“Making Computers Safe For Humanity” is the motto of The Dawn Project, the group that made the advertisements. Over the years, the Dawn Project has made Tesla a clear target. In addition to its two Super Bowl advertisements, their website is now almost entirely focused on highlighting its criticism of Tesla.
O’Dowd reportedly paid half a million dollars to have the “Boycott Tesla” Super Bowl advertisements run in the desired markets, according to the Washington Post.
The “Boycott Tesla” advertisements are visually catching
You may recognize all of this because O’Dowd and The Dawn Project also ran anti-Tesla advertisements during the Super Bowl the previous year. The advertisements from the previous year highlighted how tests revealed that Tesla’s self-driving software caused the car to smash through school bus stop signs and into kid-sized crash test dummies.
The Dawn Project didn’t need to consult a test scenario this time, though. The same school bus situation occurred in real life two months after the ad from the previous year aired, when a Tesla operating on Autopilot struck a 17-year-old in North Carolina as he was getting off the bus. The school bus’s lights were flashing and its stop sign was broken. One of The Dawn Project’s two Super Bowl advertisements this year features this incident.
The second advertisement from The Dawn Project is even more eye-catching since it directs viewers to the Tesla owner’s manual, which lists the safe zones for using Autopilot. The advertisement highlights how the government has asked Tesla to restrict the use of Autopilot to freeways, claiming that “Tesla dances away from liability in Autopilot crashes by pointing to a note buried deep in the owner’s manual that says Autopilot is only safe on freeways.”
The California Department of Motor Vehicles announced in December that self-driving cars made by Cruise, a division of General Motors, would not be permitted to operate in the city after a pedestrian was run over and dragged 20 feet by one of the vehicles. Subsequently, it came to light that Cruise had disguised the gravity of the mishap and had recalled all 950 of its “robotaxis” that had previously been seen exploring San Francisco.
Related: A Tesla Driver Wearing an Apple Vision Pro Causes This Government Warning.