California tech titan’s Senate run has one target: Tesla’s self-driving software

theguardian.com:

Dan O’Dowd is hardly the first California tech titan to bankroll his own campaign for high political office. What makes him unusual is that he has no interest in winning the US Senate seat he is vying for, or even in challenging the other candidates competing in the 7 June primary.

O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur with a 40-year history of working on military, aerospace and other commercial contracts, is running, rather, out of frustration at his fellow tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whom he accuses of endangering road safety with a driver assistance software package he’s put in his Tesla electric cars.

O’Dowd doesn’t deny that this is a strikingly narrow platform on which to run for public office. He’s aware, too, that there are risks as well as potential rewards in using a political campaign to take a swing at the world’s richest man – especially now that Musk is dominating headlines as the prospective new owner of Twitter.

But O’Dowd is also unapologetic about being a single-issue candidate. His mission, he says, is to ensure that government regulators become much tougher with the “move fast and break things” ethos that has inspired Musk and many other tech pioneers over the past two decades. He’s spent $650,000 on advertising so far and seems poised to spend a lot more over the next six weeks.

And, in his mind, it’s not just about Musk. O’Dowd believes that the problems he’s documented with Tesla’s “full self-driving” software package – problems that, according to publicly available video footage, have caused vehicles to veer unexpectedly into the wrong lane, turn the wrong way, crash into poles and endanger other road users – are emblematic of a broader and increasingly serious problem.

In a world increasingly dependent on