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Read: Tesla’s full cease-and-desist letter to The Dawn Project over its anti-FSD campaign
After weeks of Dan O’Dowd’s The Dawn Project aggressively pushing its new anti-FSD ad, Tesla has sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the campaign be stopped immediately.
A full copy of Tesla’s cease-and-desist letter was recently shared online courtesy of FSD Beta tester @WholeMarsCatalog. As could be seen in the document, Tesla was quite thorough in its arguments against O’Dowd’s anti-FSD campaign. The electric vehicle maker also made it a point to highlight that its vehicles consistently rank among the safest in the industry, as validated by international testing agencies.
Following is the text of Tesla’s cease-and-desist letter.
AUGUST 11, 2022
VIA EMAIL AND OVERNIGHT MAIL
Mr. Daniel O’Dowd, Founder and CEO
The Dawn Project, Inc.
Re: Cease and Desist
Dear Mr. O’Dowd:
It has come to our attention that you, personally, and The Dawn Project have been disparaging Tesla’s commercial interests and disseminating defamatory information to the public regarding the capabilities of Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) (Beta) technology. We demand that you immediately cease and desist further dissemination of all defamatory information, issue a formal public retraction within 24 hours and provide Tesla with the below demanded documentation.
Californians soundly rejected a political campaign, which was based on the single issue of spreading misinformation about Tesla, with barely 1% of voters in California’s U.S. Senate Race showing support for this platform. Despite the public’s very clear rejection, you and The Dawn Project continue to spread misinformation about Tesla, by falsely claiming that Tesla’s FSD (Beta) technology will not recognize children and by falsely stating that the feature will run over children when it is engaged. The purported tests misuse and misrepresent the capabilities of Tesla’s technology, and disregard widely recognized testing performed by independent agencies as well as the experiences shared by our customers. In fact, unsolicited scrutiny of the methodology behind The Dawn Project’s tests has already (and within hours of you publicly making defamatory allegations) shown that the testing is seriously deceptive and likely fraudulent.
First, to be clear, FSD Beta incorporates safety by design and does recognize pedestrians, including children, and when utilized properly, the system reacts to prevent or mitigate a collision. In addition, every Tesla is equipped with Forward Collision Warning to warn drivers of an impending frontal collision; Automatic Emergency Braking to apply braking when an obstacle is detected that the Tesla may impact; and Obstacle-Aware Acceleration to reduce acceleration when an obstacle ahead is in the driving path.
Second, the totality of these safety features are the reason why Tesla vehicles have earned a reputation for being the safest on the road. Contrary to the obviously results-driven bias of your purported tests, independent safety agencies have rated Tesla’s safety at the highest levels. For example, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an independent nonprofit scientific organization dedicated to reducing death and injuries on the roadways, rates current tested Tesla models with “superior” Automatic Emergency Braking for both vehicle-to-pedestrian prevention and vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Notably, the IIHS conducted tests simulating crossing children for the 2022 Tesla Model 3 and 2022 Tesla Model Y, and in the tests, both models avoided collisions with the child dummies.
In contrast, your testing and methodology have already received swift and public rebukes from multiple sources. For example, the commercial you released claims that the tests shown were performed with Tesla’s FSD Beta engaged. But Electrek reported that your our own videos clearly show that FSD Beta was not engaged at times. Similarly, Electrek reports that The Dawn Project manipulated its video after being confronted with the defamatory nature of its advertisement. Despite your clear knowledge of the misleading nature of the advertisements, you continue to promote and disseminate these advertisements on multiple mediums.
While you and The Dawn Project purport to advocate for safety, the videos portray unsafe and improper use of FSD Beta and active safety features. Your actions actually put consumers at risk.
Accordingly, we demand the following:
1. Immediately cease and desist the dissemination of all defamatory advertisements;
2. Immediately remove the videos under the caption “Test Track” from The Dawn Project
website and any website where you or The Dawn Project disseminated a copy;
3. Issue a public retraction of all defamatory and false claims within 24 hours of receipt of this correspondence;
4. Disclose all sources of funding for the purported “tests” in the commercial, including whether any campaign funds were used or whether you were funded by Tesla’s competitors;
5. Disclose all recognized regulatory agencies that endorsed your testing methodology and/or results.
Furthermore, you and The Dawn Project, including any and all employees, officers, directors, and agents, are hereby placed on notice that Tesla demands that you preserve all documents, including communications, videos, and data, related to your purported tests and advertisements (including print and video) along with any and all communications surrounding the same. Tesla will exercise all legal remedies available to it in the event of your non-compliance with the above and reserves all rights. Please adjust your actions accordingly.
Very truly yours,
Dinna Eskin, Esq.
Sr. Director and Deputy General Counsel
Tesla, Inc.
Cc: The Dawn Project, Inc. Registered Agent
1505 Corporation
986
National Registered Agents, Inc.
🦇 💩 crazy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2022
While Tesla’s cease-and-desist letter shows that Tesla is dead serious about stopping The Dawn Project’s anti-FSD campaign, Elon Musk himself appears to be taking the events in stride, at least for now. In a response on Twitter, Musk simply posted a couple of emojis suggesting that the whole scenario is “bat sh*t crazy.”
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
Elon Musk
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a recent podcast interview that Tesla is not who Americans should look at to beat Chinese carmakers.
The comments have sparked quite a bit of outrage from Tesla fans on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
Farley said that Chinese automakers are better examples of how to beat competitors. He said (via the Rapid Response Podcast):
“If you’re an American and you want us to beat the Chinese in the car business, you’re all going to want to pay attention, not necessarily to Tesla. Nothing against Tesla—they’ve been doing great—but they really don’t have an updated vehicle. The best in the business for us, cost-wise and competition-wise, supply chain, manufacturing expertise, and the I.P. in the vehicle, was really BYD. In this next cycle of EV customers in the U.S., they want pickups and utilities and all these different body styles. But they want them at $30,000, not $50,000. Like the first inning, they want them affordably.”
Despite Farley’s synopsis, it is worth mentioning that Tesla had the best-selling passenger vehicle in the world last year, and in China in March, as the Model Y continued its global dominance over other vehicles.
Musk responded to Farley’s comments by stating:
“This is before Supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.”
This is before supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2026
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford cancels all-electric F-150 Lightning, announces $19.5 billion in charges
Instead, Ford is “doubling down on its affordable” EVs and said it would pivot from its previous plans.
Reaction from Tesla fans was pretty much how you would expect. Many said they have lost a lot of respect for Farley after his comments; others believe he is the last CEO anyone should be taking advice on EVs from.
Nevertheless, Farley’s plans are bold and brash; many consider Tesla the most ideal company to replicate EV efforts from. It will be interesting to see if Ford can rebound from this big adjustment, and hopefully, Farley’s plans to replicate efforts from BYD work out the way he hopes.
Elon Musk
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
NASA awarded SpaceX a $175 million Mars rover contract while the White House proposes cutting the mission.
NASA just signed a $175.7 million contract with SpaceX to launch a Mars rover that the White House is simultaneously trying to defund. The contract, awarded on April 16, 2026, tasks SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with launching the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, no earlier than late 2028. It would mark the first time SpaceX has ever sent a payload to Mars.
Under NASA’s Rosalind Franklin Support and Augmentation project, known as ROSA, the agency is providing braking engines for the rover’s descent stage, radioisotope heater units that use decaying plutonium to keep the rover warm on the Martian surface, additional electronics, and a mass spectrometer instrument, as noted by SpaceNews.
Those nuclear heating units are the reason an American rocket was required at all. U.S. export controls on radioisotope technology mean any payload carrying them must launch on a domestic vehicle, which narrowed the field to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Falcon Heavy’s pricing made it the practical choice.
SpaceX is quietly becoming the U.S. Military’s only reliable rocket
Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 and has 11 launches to its record. The rocket has not flown since October 2024, when it sent NASA’s Europa Clipper toward Jupiter. The three-core design, built from modified Falcon 9 first stages, gives it the lift capacity needed for deep space planetary missions that a single Falcon 9 cannot reach.
The Rosalind Franklin rover has been sitting in storage in Europe for years. It was originally due to launch in 2022 as a joint mission with Russia, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that partnership, leaving the rover built but stranded without a launch vehicle or landing hardware. NASA stepped back in through a 2024 agreement with ESA to rescue the mission. The rover is designed to drill up to two meters below the Martian surface in search of evidence of past life, a science objective no previous mission has attempted at that depth.
The contradiction at the center of this story is hard to ignore. The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal included no funding for ROSA and did not mention the mission at all in the detailed congressional justification document released April 3.
Musk has long argued that reaching Mars is not optional. “We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.” Whether this particular mission survives Washington’s budget fight, the Falcon Heavy contract means SpaceX is now formally on record as the rocket that could get humanity’s next Mars science mission off the ground.
The timing of this contract carries extra weight given that SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC in early April and is targeting an IPO roadshow in the week of June 8. It would be the largest public offering in history.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set to hold its Earnings Call for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday, and there are a lot of interesting things that are swirling around in terms of speculation from investors.
With the company’s executives, including CEO Elon Musk, answering a handful of questions that investors submit through the Say platform, fans want to know a lot of things about a lot of things.
These five questions come from Retail Investors, who are normal, everyday shareholders:
- When will we have the Optimus v3 reveal? When will Optimus production start, since we ended the Model S and Model X production earlier than mid-year? What’s the expected Optimus production rate exiting this year? What are the initial targeted skills?
- What milestones are you targeting for unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin this year, and how will that drive recurring revenue?
- How will Hardware 3 cars reach Unsupervised Full Self-Driving?
- When do you expect Unsupervised Full Self-Driving to reach customer cars?
- When will Robotaxi expand past its current limited rollout?
Additionally, these are currently the three questions that are slated to be answered by Institutional Firms, which also answer a handful of questions during the call:
- Now that FSD has been approved in the Netherlands and is expected to launch across Europe this summer, can you discuss your Robotaxi strategy for the region?
- What enabled you to finish the AI5 tapeout early and were there any changes to the original vision? Last week, Elon said AI5 will go into Optimus and the Supercomputer, but one month ago said it would go into the Robotaxi. Has AI5 been dropped from the vehicle roadmap?
- Given the recent NHTSA incident filings, can you update us on the Robotaxi safety data? If safety validation remains the primary bottleneck, why not deploy thousands of vehicles to accelerate the removal of the safety driver?
The questions range through every current Tesla project, including FSD expansion and Optimus. However, many of the answers we will get will likely be repetitive answers we’ve heard in the past.
This is especially pertinent when the questions about when Unsupervised FSD will reach customer cars: we know Musk will say that it will happen this year. Is Tesla capable of that? Maybe. But a more transparent answer that is more revealing of a true timeline would be appreciated.
Hardware 3 owners are anxiously awaiting the arrival of FSD v14 Lite, which was promised to them last year for a release sometime this year.
The Earnings Call is set to take place on Wednesday at market close.
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
