This year’s Super Bowl brought viewers an unexpected sight: advertisements against Tesla produced by The Dawn Project, a company run by another tech CEO. Tesla hasn’t yet dabbled in Super Bowl advertising, but The Dawn Project used the occasion to promote boycotts with commercials throughout the game.
The Dawn Project used the Super Bowl stage to highlight what it believes to be Tesla’s safety flaws for the second year running. The advertisements showed footage of Tesla crashes that were allegedly caused by the company’s driver assistance technology.
Two startling films were shown to viewers in one advertisement: one showed a Tesla crashing into a truck at an intersection, and the other showed someone running a stop sign and hitting a parked automobile. The other advertisement told the story of an incident in which a child was seriously injured when a Tesla that was supposed to be “self-driving” failed to stop for a school bus.
The Dawn Project’s slogan, “Tesla must be held accountable,” was emphasized in the advertisements. Citing safety concerns, they called on customers to boycott Tesla.
Tesla, a company renowned for using unorthodox marketing techniques, has said nothing about the advertisements. Historically, the business has shunned conventional advertising channels in favor of depending on CEO Elon Musk’s charisma to enhance its brand image.
The Super Bowl advertisements this year reportedly cost $552,000, according to The Dawn Project. This action comes after a comparable effort by the organization in the previous year, when it used a variety of media platforms to attack Tesla’s driver-assist systems, including Full Self-Driving.
Dan O’Dowd, the organization’s founder, has a track record of going after Tesla and Musk. O’Dowd, who is also the CEO of Green Hills Software, has actively opposed Tesla’s Autopilot and Fully Self-Driving capabilities in his campaigns, going so far as to try to win a Senate seat in 2022 on a platform critical of the company.
The Dawn Project’s tenacious campaigning highlights enduring worries about the safety and dependability of Tesla’s cutting-edge driver-assist systems, despite Tesla’s insistence that its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving capabilities are still in beta testing and need driver supervision.