The Dawn Project and Tesla Takedown to Demonstrate the Danger Tesla Full Self-Driving Poses to Children in Live Austin Safety Tests

Yahoo

12-06-2025

AUSTIN, Texas, June 12, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Public safety advocacy group The Dawn Project is collaborating with Tesla Takedown to demonstrate the critical safety defects of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software in a live demonstration in Downtown Austin today.
The Dawn Project, in partnership with Tesla Takedown and ResistAustin, will demonstrate that the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving, version 13.2.9, will run down a child crossing the road while illegally blowing past a stopped school bus with its red lights flashing and stop sign extended.
The event will begin at 11am CDT on Thursday 12 June at the intersection of Camacho and Mattie Streets by Mueller Park in Austin and the media and public are encouraged to attend.
The organizations are choosing to conduct the demonstration on 12 June as it is the day which Bloomberg reported would mark the beginning of Tesla's Robotaxi service in Austin. Tesla has failed to meet this reported deadline and this week Elon Musk 'tentatively' set a new public launch date of 22 June. Tesla is also headquartered in Austin.
Both The Dawn Project and Tesla Takedown are calling for a boycott of Tesla. For the past two years The Dawn Project has urged the public not to buy new Tesla vehicles and to sell their Tesla shares until the automaker fixes the safety critical defects in 'Full Self-Driving' and Tesla conclusively demonstrates that it is safe for use on public roads. Tesla Takedown has organized nationwide protests against Elon Musk and Tesla in recent months.
The Dawn Project first warned Tesla that Full Self-Driving would illegally overtake stopped school buses in November 2022, via a full-page ad campaign in The New York Times. Tesla took no action to address the issue. The Dawn Project subsequently broadcasted a Super Bowl Commercial in February 2023 showing video footage of Tesla Full Self-Driving blowing past stopped school buses. Tesla still did nothing. Elon Musk's reaction was to crow on Twitter that the shocking footage would 'greatly increase public awareness that a Tesla can drive itself'.
In March 2023, just one month after The Dawn Project's Super Bowl PSA, a self-driving Tesla illegally blew past a stopped school bus in North Carolina and struck a child, who was hospitalized with a fractured neck and broken leg.
Commenting on the collaboration with Tesla Takedown, Founder of The Dawn Project Dan O'Dowd said: 'Self-driving software that illegally blows past stopped school buses and runs down children crossing the road must be banned immediately. Tesla's failure to address this critical safety defect demonstrates Elon Musk's utter negligence and contempt for public safety. If Tesla's engineers cannot fix this egregiously dangerous safety defect, they should be fired. If they can fix it but are choosing not to, they should be prosecuted.
'The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must step up and ban Full Self-Driving from public roads to protect children. It is disappointing that the federal regulator in charge of road safety has taken no action to hold Tesla accountable. NHTSA must do its job and ban Tesla's defective Full Self-Driving technology from public roads before a child is killed.'
A spokesperson for Tesla Takedown commented: 'The government is failing to protect children from Tesla Full Self-Driving by allowing Tesla to test defective software on public roads. It is time for the public to step up to keep children safe from Tesla Full Self-Driving. The only way to stop Elon Musk's reckless self-driving experiments is to boycott Tesla.'
ResistAustin organizer, Nevin Kamath, commented: "Austinites are not Elon's personal crash-test dummies. ResistAustin is appalled that Musk chose our town as the launching pad for this dangerous technology and we encourage the people of Austin to boycott this dangerous service."
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