People are now testing Tesla’s ‘full self-driving’ on real kids

The North Carolina resident set out to refute a widely circulated video of a Tesla with the company’s “full self-driving” beta software — which allows the car to steer, brake and accelerate, but requires an attentive human driver ready to take the wheel — plowing into child-size mannequins. Dan O’Dowd, a software company CEO who published the video earlier this month, thinks the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should ban “full self-driving” until Tesla CEO Elon Musk “proves it won’t mow down children.” That’s when Cupani, who runs an auto shop focused on imports and Teslas, got involved and recruited his son. While he’s a self-described “BMW guy,” Cupani says the software can’t compare to what Tesla offers. It also wasn’t the first time he’d enlisted his son, who Cupani said is 11 years old, in a potentially viral car endeavor: Earlier this year he posted a video of his son driving his Model S Plaid — which can reach 0-60 in 1.99 seconds — in a private parking lot. It’s been viewed more than 250,000 times. “Some people look at it and say, ‘Oh this crazy dad, what is he doing?'” Cupani told CNN Business. “Well, I do a lot of stuff like that, but I’m going to make sure my kid doesn’t get hit.” O’Dowd told CNN Business that the blurry messages referred to supercharging being unavailable, and to uneven tire wear. CNN Business could not independently verify what the message said as O’Dowd provided no crisper video of what happened in car during the tests. In his second video, O’Dowd’s tested without cones on a residential street and showed the interior of the Tesla, including the accelerator pedal. The Tesla, as in O’Dowd’s other tests, struck the child mannequin. O’Dowd lamented earlier this year in an interview with CNN Business that no industry testing body examines the code for “full self-driving.” The US government has no performance standards for automated driver-assist technology like Autopilot. O’Dowd is the founder of the Dawn Project, an effort to make computers safe for humanity. He ran as a candidate for the US Senate unsuccessfully this year in a campaign focused exclusively on his critique of “full self-driving.”NHTSA is currently investigating Tesla’s driver-assist technology so changes may be ahead. “The software that controls billions of people’s lives in self-driving cars should be the best software ever written,” O’Dowd said. “We’re using absolute, Wild West chaos rules and we’ve gotten something that is so terrible.”