A full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times declares “We did not sign up our families to be crash test dummies for thousands of Tesla cars,” but the ad is affiliated with a rival self-driving software company.

It probably did not get as much press attention as it should have in late December when Tesla recalled a half a million cars over safety issues, and as Reuters reported, that half a million cars “is almost equivalent to the half a million vehicles Tesla delivered last year.” For all the hype about how Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company is supposedly running circles around the rest of the auto industry, the company’s output is negligible compared to some competitors, and its self-driving claims often overblown.

Those self-driving claims were the focus of a highly critical full-page ad in the New York Times Sunday, according to TechCrunch. That ad, which you can see copy of here, declares in headline font “Don’t be a Tesla Crash Test Dummy.”

That ad calls Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software “the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company,” and makes the claim that “If Full Self-Driving was fully driving every car, millions would die every day.” It should be noted that the ad was taken out by something called the Dawn Project, whose co-founder is CEO of Green Hills Software, which makes software for Tesla rival BMW iX.

And of course Tesla CEO Elon Musk went after them on Twitter, saying “Green Hills software is a pile of trash.”

So yes, this is a pissing match between tech executives, the kind of petty conflict on which Elon Musk thrives. But Elon Musk does not thrive on increased regulatory oversight from the California DMV, and the Verge reports that may soon be his bigger problem.

Related: Tesla Autopilot ‘Backseat Driver’ Scofflaw Spotted Multiple Times on Bay Area Roads [SFist]

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