Dan O’Dowd says Tesla’s ‘Full Self Driving’ software shouldn’t be on the road. He’ll keep running over test dummies until someone listens.
The third Tesla is crucial for an unusual hobby: O’Dowd is waging a multimillion-dollar campaign to get Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software off the roads — before Tesla CEO Elon Musk follows through with plans to make the tech available worldwide by the end of the year.
O’Dowd, who made his fortune selling software to military customers, has been using the Model 3 to test and film the self-driving software. He’s documented what appear to be examples of the car swerving across the centerline toward oncoming traffic, failing to slow down in a school zone and missing stop signs. This summer, he triggered an uproar by releasing a video showing his Tesla — allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode — mowing down child-size mannequins.
“If Tesla gets away with this and ships this product and I can’t convince the public that a self-driving car that drives like a drunken, suicidal 13-year-old shouldn’t be on the road, I’m going to fail,” O’Dowd said in an interview from his Santa Barbara office, where glass cases display his collection of ancient coins and auction-bought mementos from NASA moon missions.
O’Dowd has run nationwide TV ads with the videos and even launched an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate as part of his one-man crusade to challenge what he sees as the cavalier development of dangerous technology. For O’Dowd and other skeptics, the program is a deadly experiment foisted on an unsuspecting public — a view underscored by a recently filed class-action lawsuit and a reported Department of Justice investigation into the tech.
Despite O’Dowd’s high-profile campaign, and the concern from some regulators and politicians, Tesla is charging ahead with what it claims is world-changing technology. The company and its supporters argue their approach will help usher in a future in which death from human errors on roadways is eliminated. At the end of September, during a four-hour event in which Tesla showed off its latest artificial intelligence tech, Musk said Full Self-Driving is already saving lives and keeping it off public roads would be “morally wrong.”
“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said. Musk and Tesla, which does not typically answer media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.
Readying Full-Self-Driving for worldwide deployment by the end of next month adds to Musk’s heavy workload. On top of running Tesla and his other companies SpaceX and Neuralink, he now owns and runs Twitter. Musk has also roped in Tesla engineers to help work on Twitter.
O’Dowd’s quest has prompted personal attacks and criticism from Musk’s legions of supporters. Tesla sent O’Dowd a cease-and-desist letter in response to his child mannequin test. And this week, O’Dowd says a new ad he tried to run on Twitter was rejected.
But Tesla fans aren’t his only critics. Safety experts have questioned whether rogue independent testing is the right way to spur tougher regulation.
“They’re doing it on public roads. It still raises the same ethical issues that you’re putting other people at nonconsensual risk,” said Phil Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied autonomous car safety for years. “I’m not a fan no matter who it is.”
“Consumers should never attempt to create their own test scenarios,” said National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spokeswoman Lucia Sanchez.
O’Dowd’s view that software should be developed methodically, ensuring it’s fully secure before releasing it, is a stark contrast to the “move fast and break things” mantra that allowed companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon to become the behemoths they are today. Tesla has taken that mantra and applied it to public roads, he believes. O’Dowd’s critics allege his campaign against Tesla is self-serving: One of his customers — Intel-owned Mobileye — makes a computer chip that runs driver- assist and self-driving software. O’Dowd says Mobileye is just one of hundreds of customers and his motivation is driven purely by his concerns about the safety of Tesla’s tech.
Tesla cars have had a range of driver-assist features for years, like lane-keeping and automatic braking, called Autopilot. Millions of vehicles in the U.S. use advanced drive-assist features, and more than 60 percent of the cars sold in 2021 had lane-keeping, according to research firm Canalys. Data released by NHTSA in June showed that Tesla cars were involved in almost 70 percent of the 392 crashes involving advanced drive-assist features reported over the previous 11 months. NHTSA also recorded six deaths dating back to 2019 involving the features, five of which were tied to Teslas. The data set doesn’t account for how different automakers collect data, making direct comparisons with other manufacturers difficult.
But the company’s Full Self-Driving Beta program, which is currently available to about 160,000 drivers in the U.S. and Canada, goes further than anything else used by regular drivers on public roads, giving the car the ability to navigate through city and residential streets, stop for red lights and make turns on its own while following a mapped route.
“Everybody thinks I’m exaggerating, but I have literally never seen a worse program in my life,” O’Dowd said.
As a teenager in suburban Michigan, O’Dowd found a passion for coding, learning how to program on an IBM computer.
The year after graduating from the California Institute of Technology, he designed his first “debugger,” a computer program that can run through another set of code and find its flaws. The process of methodically fixing errors fascinated him, and set off a lifelong mission against what he sees as an epidemic of terrible, bug-ridden software infiltrating the world.
In 1982 he founded Green Hills Software in Pasadena, Calif., to make operating systems for the tiny computers that were beginning to pop up inside industrial machines, planes, ships and trains. His super-secure approach won over the U.S. military, and his first big sale was to the maker of the B1-B supersonic bomber.
O’Dowd is no stranger to public fights. Two decades ago, he wrote several blog posts saying that Linux, the free, available-to-all operating system that was beginning to threaten his business, was dangerous because foreign spies could insert malicious code into it. His warnings mostly fell on deaf ears. Today, Linux is everywhere, and Green Hills’ own software is capable of interacting with Linux programs. But O’Dowd’s position hasn’t changed. Linux may be fine for tools like thermostats, but when it comes to planes, power plants and cars, he insists it’s still dangerous.
O’Dowd owns most of Green Hills, which was worth just shy of a billion dollars in 2019 when he sold a $150 million chunk of it. Beyond several houses in tony Santa Barbara, he doesn’t want to spend his money on the yachts and private islands other wealthy tech founders seem to delight in.
In the past, O’Dowd bought historical artifacts — he owns the world’s most expensive coin collection, and has both a Nazi-era Enigma encoding machine and a nearly intact fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex skull displayed in his offices.
As he got older, O’Dowd said he began looking for a more lasting project to spend his money on. About a year ago, a colleague told him about Tesla Full Self-Driving videos online. O’Dowd spent hours watching them, and said he was shocked by what he saw.
“Why would you put a car on the road that does something that would be illegal, that would cost you your license?” he said. He decided to make Tesla’s software the centerpiece of a bigger campaign he has named the Dawn Project to expose what he sees as incomplete and unsafe software being used in cars and power plants and in cybersecurity.
In early 2016, a year after Tesla first launched Autopilot, Musk said the tech was already “probably better” than a human driver and predicted that in two years his cars would be able to drive themselves across the country.
That hasn’t happened yet, but the company has steadily upgraded Autopilot over the years, allowing drivers to give up more control over their vehicles, though Tesla insists they must stay alert at all times. Full Self-Driving Beta represents the latest version of Tesla’s tech, and is available to Tesla drivers who’ve already paid $15,000 for the regular version of Full Self-Driving and have a good “safety score” as measured by Tesla’s in-car software.
In an interview with a Tesla owners group posted in June, Musk said successfully building self-driving software is “the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”
Autopilot technology has spurred several government investigations, including one from NHTSA that is looking at…
