SANTA BARBARA, Calif., May 01, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Dawn Project welcomes the conclusion of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) investigation into the safety risks posed by Tesla’s self-driving software, known as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.

NHTSA’s conclusions confirm The Dawn Project’s findings that Tesla’s self-driving software lacks the necessary safeguards to protect consumers and that Tesla misleads buyers of its self-driving software with deceptive safety statistics.

Elon Musk recently advertised: “the data is unequivocal that supervised Full Self-Driving is somewhere around four times safer, maybe more, than just a human driving by themselves.”

However, the new data from NHTSA estimates that Tesla didn’t count 82% of police reported crashes involving its self-driving software. The real number of self-driving Tesla crashes is more than five and a half times higher than Tesla reported in its Vehicle Safety Report.

When all of the Tesla crashes are counted, the data is unequivocal that supervised Full Self-Driving is far less safe than a human driving by themselves.

NHTSA’s explanation of Tesla’s data corroborates The Dawn Project’s research and analysis that found that engaging Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software is much less safe than a human driving by themselves.

For example, Tesla Full Self-Driving fails a DMV driver’s test. So, FSD is a worse driver than even the worst 16 year old with a license. FSD will blow past a stopped school bus with its red lights flashing and stop sign extended and run down a child in a school crosswalk.

Further proof that FSD is much less safe than a human driver is that people who paid Tesla up to $15,000 for the software in order to make them and their family four times safer, turn it off 85% of the time. They wouldn’t do this if it made them safer.

As more people have seen how dangerous Tesla Full Self-Driving is, partly as a result of Tesla offering a one month free trial to all 1.8 million Teslas in North America, Tesla was forced to lower the price by 50% in a desperate attempt to get unwitting consumers to buy it.

Dan O’Dowd, founder of The Dawn Project, commented: “It’s despicable to promote and sell self-driving software to safety-conscious consumers by advertising that it will make their families four times safer, when instead it will try to kill them.”

Contact: Arthur Maltin, (805) 335-7807, press@dawnproject.com