Super Bowl 57 Ad Takes Aim at Elon Musk and Tesla's Self-Driving Cars

Companies often pay hundreds of thousands to land an ad spot in the Super Bowl. A Tesla critic has spent over half a million dollars to run an ad in the Super Bowl 57 Sunday night to slam the Elon Musk company and show the alleged dangers of its Full Self-Driving technology.

The ad is part of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign by The Dawn Project that will be aired in Washington, D.C., Austin, Tallahassee, Albany, Atlanta, and Sacramento. According to CNN, it promises not to be kind to Elon Musk's multimillion-dollar car company.

The Dawn Project founder Dan O'Dowd, a California tech CEO, has already dedicated millions of dollars of his own money to talk about the dangers of Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology. For this year's Super Bowl ad, he is paying around $598,000.

The ad claims that Tesla used "deceptive marketing and woefully inept engineering" to endanger the public. It pointed out Tesla's alleged design flaws as the project shot its own videos to point these out. It showed a Tesla Model 3, which allegedly has the Full Self-Driving mode turned on, running over a dummy that simulates a child on a school crosswalk.

Self-Driving Tesla Car Runs Wild in Super Bowl 57 Ad

Dan O'Dowd has made it his personal mission to ban Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature and has already spent millions of dollars to prove his point. That comes as the Tesla system is still officially in a developmental "beta" program but is already intended to be released on city streets.

The self-driving feature is already available in North America for $15,000 despite still being tested. This new Super Bowl ad, scheduled to air during the Super Bowl 57 ad break, shows a self-driving Tesla car violating seven traffic rules.

Some of these have deadly outcomes, including plowing through a child. The other violations include running over a stroller in the street, driving past a school bus with its automatic stop sign showing, going through a "Do Not Enter" sign and driving on the wrong side of the road.

However, viewers are to assume that the car uses the Tesla Full Self-Driving system and does not show proof that the system was activated and operating during the video. The ad claimed that "ninety percent agree that this should be banned immediately." However, it does not state what the survey of the 90% agreement is based on, The Street reported.

Tesla Self-Driving Cars investigated

In 2021, a fiery crash in Texas brought much more scrutiny over Tesla's self-driving feature, The car accident involved a Tesla vehicle with self-driving capability, and it resulted in the deaths of two people. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the autopilot feature, a less sophisticated version of FSD, was not turned on at the time of the crash.

In June 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated that they had expanded their investigation into Tesla after analysis of several accidents revealed patterns in the car's performance and driver behavior.

According to The Guardian, the NHTSA investigation found that the FSD "may exacerbate human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver's supervision."

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: The Dawn Project Super Bowl Commercial - From The Dawn Project