'Boycott Tesla' Super Bowl attack ad gets cease and desist letter from wronged federal agency

The use of the National Transportation Safety Board logo in one of the Dawn Project's anti-Tesla commercials during the Super Bowl has resulted in a cease and desist letter sent by the federal agency. It turns out that Dan O'Dowd's next installment of Autopilot safety commercials has used the NTSB logo without authorization to infer endorsement of its tests and Tesla-basing claims. The National Transportation Safety Board reacted immediately:

Contrary to Federal law, you did not obtain, and the NTSB did not grant, permission to use the NTSB Seal in your Super Bowl LVIII commercial or on any other materials. Moreover, your unauthorized use of the NTSB’s seal spuriously implies endorsement of your company and/or message by the NTSB. Accordingly, the NTSB demands that you cease any further unsanctioned use of the NTSB Seal, and that the NTSB’s Seal be immediately removed from your website and YouTube page, as well as any further airings of the offending commercial. We further request that you notify us in writing when all changes have been made.

The NTSB is an investigative agency of the U.S. government that examines the reasons for civil transport accidents in order to prevent them from happening in the future. As such, it wants to stay impartial and sees any efforts to attach it to commercial undertakings as threatening its credibility.

Dan O'Dowd's Dawn Project has been engaged in a crusade against Tesla's Autopilot for a while now and has run tests that bash its safety record. Despite that their methodology has been deemed controversial, the Dawn Project again aired Super Bowl ads to tout its test findings.

On one of those, the NTSB seal appears exactly when the narrator says that Tesla refused to comply with federal demands to restrict Autopilot usage for the highways only. The agency is having none of this endorsement racket and the Dawn Project had to blur its seal in the video below.

Instead, the NTSB points users to a section of its website where it discusses those "Level-2 automation and associated safety recommendations" that encompass Tesla's FSD and Autopilot options, too.

Get the 80A Tesla Gen 2 Wall Connector with 24' cable on Amazon