“Trillion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme.”
“Deep Flaws.”
“Unsafe.”
The television ads for Dan O’Dowd, a software billionaire running as a Democrat for Senate in California, are not your typical campaign spots. To an extraordinary degree, they’re all aimed at one topic: Tesla’s automated driving software. Not at his putative opponent, Senator Alex Padilla, the incumbent Democrat.
O’Dowd’s campaign slogan is “Making Computers Safe for Humanity.” Tesla’s computers, he claims, are not.
“The problem of the last five or 10 years has been that we’ve been taking everything that our lives depend on and putting computers in charge of it,” O’Dowd said in an interview. “So now our power grid, our cars, or our dams, or bridges, hospitals — everything has been put in computers that have been put in charge of everything.”
He added: “And a lot of the software that was used to do that is very poor quality.”
O’Dowd’s initial focus, he said, is on Tesla’s full self-driving software, which he says should have never been allowed on the road.
“The software that drives cars that are going to have millions of people depending on it should be our best software, the most carefully designed and tested software,” he said. “Instead we’re using literally the worst software.”
O’Dowd also ran a paid ad in a print edition of The New York Times, headlined “Don’t Be a Tesla Crash-Test Dummy.” The ad promotes The Dawn Project, O’Dowd’s website…
