The YouTube video banned for telling the truth about Tesla!
FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is a shorthand for all of the effort and millions of dollars spent trying to negatively influence perception through misinformation and Tesla has been the target of countless smear campaigns for over a decade now. Since the original Model S was produced in 2012 and steadily gained in popularity, so too did those with a vested interest in perpetuating the fossil fuel industry find themselves at the receiving end of a large cheque, in exchange for their voice and morality.
Despite all of it, Elon himself is not worried about the situation. Partly due to the multitudes of loyal fans and customers that have experienced the truth first-hand and vocally protest against the fear-mongering, yet also just because the age-old adage 'All publicity is good publicity' actually holds true and even (or perhaps especially) a shocking story about the company will spark interest in the general public, increasing it's visibility and prompting ever more people to do their own research. As the figures cannot be argued with, after a horror story is shared about Tesla in the news their sales actually increase because the fiction is easily picked apart and simple brand recognition works wonders. It also greatly helps that their products are verifiably, hands-down the best on the market!
So here we are with the latest instance of alleged slander against Tesla, put forth by Dan O'Dowd, funnily enough the owner of Green Hills Software, a company that produces automation software for vehicles and is a direct competitor to Tesla. After failing to be elected to US government on the sole policy of banning Tesla Autopilot and running a full-page ad to spread misinformation, he's now taken it on himself to fight what is in his words ‘the worst commercial software' he's ever seen - Full-Self-Driving - claiming that it willfully disregards human life and runs down children. He even produced a very convincing commercial in an extremely controlled environment and completely unrepresentative of real world conditions.
It appears to show a car with FSD engaged fail to stop before ploughing into child manikins on a test track, which would be alarming if you don't know the first thing about the software, but with very little inspection and cross-reference of their own behind-the-scenes footage, it clearly shows it's all a staged fabrication and the claims are being made purely for personal financial gain. FSD has been proven time and again to save lives, so anybody pushing this adamantly to delay it's approval or dissuading people from buying it will cause additional road fatalities that could have been avoided. Thanks Dan, for putting your wealth over our children and family's lives.
But don't take my word for it, plenty of contradictory video evidence has already been released on the subject, the most notable of which being from Whole Mars Catalog who performed the same testing on a real-world street, with live people and unsurprisingly the car driving under it's own control simply refused to move near them. This video has since been taken down from YouTube for breaching their terms of service, ignoring the fact that there's infinitely more disturbing content available on the platform, it appears that CNBC have coerced Google's hand to hide the truth. In my opinion, the worst thing you can do if you want to silence something is to have it banned, as clearly more people will actively seek it out, but since it's no longer available on YouTube you may find the full clip here:
Tesla's Full-Self-Driving will not only revolutionise personal transportation and the global supply chain, but once widely deployed enough, could also prevent a majority of the 1.3 million deaths caused by traffic collisions globally each year. Is Dan's work really in the best interest of humanity? Or is FSD our best shot at Level-5 autonomy and preventing billions in collateral damage and millions of deaths?