Tesla FSD Beta testers are debunking the claims that FSD doesn’t stop for “children.” Tesla FSD Beta critic, The Dawn Project, recently aired EV ads showing clips of a test that it paid for. These tests, according to The Dawn Project, show that Tesla’s FSD Beta “Tesla’s FSD software “repeatedly hits child-sized mannequins.”
Dan O’Dowd, the founder of The Dawn Project, said that Tesla’s FSD is “a lethal threat to all Americans.” Earlier this year, O’Dowd placed a full-page ad in the New York Times campaigning to ban Tesla’s FSD. He also ran for the state senate in California. His entire campaign was centered around banning Tesla’s FSD.
Debunking the claims that Tesla’s FSD Beta hits “children”
Many Tesla owners and FSD Beta testers not only disagree, but some have decided to perform their own tests. On Twitter, @WholeMarsBlog shared a thread of the many instances Tesla’s FSD Beta reacted to pedestrians and children. He pointed out that spreading misinformation is similar to running ads telling people not to wear seat belts.
Another Tesla FSD Beta tester, @TeslaDriver2022 performed their own test. I reached out to them and we spoke on the phone. @TeslaDriver2022 told me that they’ve been beta testing the software for over a year now and have seen a ton of improvements over the past year.
https://twitter.com/tesladriver2022/status/1557152108071342085
“Prior to the Beta program and even owning Teslas, I’ve owned Volvos for years with their Pilot Assist program which is kind of like basic Autopilot. And I was not seeing that progress. I have a family and I want my children in the safest vehicles which is why we had gotten Volvos.”
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@TeslaDriver2022 told me that they would see Tesla’s video and eventually they made the switch to Tesla. Their partner drives a Model Y and they drive a Model 3.
“I became very interested in the potential of Tesla’s technology and when it came time for us to get new cars we both bought Teslas because we thought they were the safest vehicles for our family to be in.”
After driving with Volvo’s Pilot Assist for years, @TeslaDriver2022 said that Tesla’s FSD Beta continues to improve.
“The FSD Beta has just been getting better exponentially even since I’ve been using it. Just some of the predictions it’s got and the capabilities to understand when things are getting in their path. Not even that. Some of the most impressive stuff is just when I’m driving down the road at 45 miles an hour and there’s a car that will turn in front of me to get into a parking lot.
“Its ability to understand whether or not that car is gonna make it or not and whether or not it needs to slow down. It’s becoming very human-like.”
@TeslaDriver2022’s Tesla FSD Beta test with “children”
I asked @TeslaDriver2022 what was it about O’Dowd’s ad that inspired them to perform their own Tesla FSD Beta testing with a “child.” @TeslaDriver2022 told me that they thought the ad “simply just was not true.”
“That commercial is 100%, not the experience I’ve ever had driving my Tesla.”
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“I saw his ad on the news after work yesterday and I thought, ‘what is this?!‘ And to be honest with you, I didn’t really know too much about him until that came out. Later on, I was just sitting on the couch really bothered by the ad.
“I drive with FSD Beta with my kids in the car all the time. I see how safe it is. It’s safer than anything else that’s out there. I was talking to my partner and joking and said that ‘I’m about to go into the garage and get one of our Amazon boxes, cut out a cardboard ‘child’ and put one of our kids’ jackets on it and run a test.’”
@TeslaDriver2022’s partner thought this was brilliant and they immediately ran the tests. They ran multiple tests and after tweeting it, received feedback from various Twitter users wanting them to perform other variations of the tests.
“When I originally tested it, I did around eight different tests and in every single one of them, the vehicle would path predict around the cardboard ‘child.’ It wasn’t even ever a close call. It went around the child-sized object every single time.”
After doing the tests that Twitter users suggested, @TeslaDriver2022 recorded what they said was the most impressive of the results.
“I had my neighbor come over and I did a couple of other videos. One was more to the right, one with the ‘child’ crossing the street, and one where my neighbor just launched it out and I think the launched-out ones were a little bit more impressive because that shows a lot of the AI that Tesla has.”
In the last set of tests, the launching out of the cardboard ‘child’ simulates an all too common scenario where a child runs out in front of an oncoming car. The fact that Tesla’s AI was able to tell what was happening and avoided hitting the object is telling.
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“I don’t necessarily believe a lot of other vehicles have that. And the fact that Tesla is constantly updating it and making it better is what’s really impressive about it.”
Tesla FSD sees 👁 children — don’t believe the fake rigged Tesla games the competition pays to put in Newspapers & TV media.
Remember TeslaQ, the haters, they have a lot of money betting against Tesla. It’s all dirty tricks. https://t.co/Zhjn66dKi1
— K10✨ (@Kristennetten) August 10, 2022
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
