A North Carolina resident is ready to refute a widely circulated video of Tesla with the company’s full self-driving beta software that allows the car to steer, brake and accelerate.
Dan O’Dowd, CEO of a software company that published the video earlier this month, believes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should ban full-fledged self-driving.
It won’t last until Tesla CEO Elon Musk proves that kids running auto shops are focused on imports and Tesla joins in and recruits his son.
He is a self-described BMW man. Kapani says the software can’t be compared to Tesla’s offering.
In a viral car attempt earlier this year she posted a video of her son driving a Model S Plaid that can do 0-60 in a private parking spot in 1.99 seconds.
Carmine Kapani and her 11-year-old son ran a test to see if Tesla’s fully self-driving would stop for a kid on the road.
Kapani filmed the entire self-driving test in the parking lot. His son stood near the end of the aisle holding a smartphone to film the test. Kapani accelerated the Tesla from the other side and reached 35 mph for full self-driving.
Tesla applied the brakes sharply and stopped well ahead of his son. Kaapani did another test with his son on the road using Autopilot which was Tesla driver-assist software and found it to work for his son.
Some asked their children to help others make homemade mannequins or blow-up dolls.
The passionate safety and criticism of full self-driving highlights how the technology has become a flashpoint in the industry. The California DMV recently said that the name full self-driving is misleading and calls for suspension or cancellation of Tesla’s license to sell vehicles in the state.
Ralph Nader, whose criticism of the auto industry in the 1960s helped create the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this month joined a group of critics of full self-driving.
It’s yet another example of the unintended consequence of deploying an unfinished disruptive technology in the wild and shows how far some Tesla believers are willing to go to protect it and the company.
Many were seen following their own experiments after a government agency took the extraordinary step of warning people not to use children to test the car’s technology.
NHTSA said in a statement on Wednesday that consumers should never attempt to create their own test scenarios or test the performance of vehicle technology for real people, and especially for children.