Super Bowl Ads to Target Tesla's Self-Driving Safety Concerns
Tech billionaire Dan O'Dowd's The Dawn Project is set to make waves at Super Bowl LVIII with two hard-hitting commercials. The ads urge consumers to boycott Tesla, highlighting safety concerns with the company's self-driving software.
The commercials, to be aired during this year's Super Bowl, feature real crash footage from victims of Tesla's self-driving software. One chilling scene shows a schoolchild being run down by a TSLA in North Carolina in March 2023. The Dawn Project argues that TSLA has failed to address critical safety defects, despite repeated warnings from authorities.
TSLA has ignored safety recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) following fatal crashes in 2016 and 2019. The company has refused to disable its software on roads where it knows it isn't safe. The second Super Bowl ad will highlight a series of crashes involving Tesla's Autopilot software in such areas. The Dawn Project's 2023 ad revealed that Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) software can run down mannequins in the road, drive into oncoming traffic, and ignore safety critical road traffic signs.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has stepped in, initiating an official investigation in August 2025. They discovered that TSLA delayed reporting crashes involving Autopilot by several months, including incidents on roads where TSLA admitted the software could not reliably operate. Tesla's self-driving software has been involved in over 1,000 crashes and 33 deaths. The Dawn Project argues that buying a new TSLA finances and enables Elon Musk to put a dangerous, unfinished product on public roads.
The Dawn Project's Super Bowl ads aim to raise awareness about the safety issues surrounding TSLA's self-driving software. The project has called upon the NHTSA to ban Tesla's defective software, urging consumers to boycott TSLA until safety concerns are adequately addressed.
