Toronto, Ontario — A lot of people call Elon Musk a renaissance man, and if that’s true, he can now list special effects artist on his resume, after a Tesla engineer testified under deposition that a 2016 video showing off the automaker’s Autopilot technology was faked.
According to Reuters, a video posted to Tesla’s website in October of 2016 that claimed to show off the then unrevealed self-driving technology was entirely staged, and the company’s director of Autopilot has the receipts.
In a transcript of a July 2022 deposition submitted as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla, Ashok Elluswamy revealed that the Model X in that video was not driving autonomously, but was, in fact, following a pre-mapped course.
He also noted that the vehicle struggled to park itself, with one test vehicle apparently crashing into a fence in the Tesla parking lot.
This news has come to light as a result of the unearthed deposition, which pertains to the 2018 lawsuit concerning the fatal crash of former Apple engineer, Walter Huang, who was behind the wheel of a Tesla on Autopilot at the time of his death.
Huang’s family and lawyers assert that the video, along with its tagline “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself,” is “obviously misleading”—and according to Elluswamy, they are absolutely correct.
At the time of the video’s release, Musk tweeted “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.”
When asked in court if the 2016 video shows the performance of an in-production Tesla vehicle operating on Autopilot, Elluswamy said “It does not.”
He says he was tasked with producing a “demonstration of the system’s capabilities” at the request of Musk.
As part of his testimony from July, Elluswamy elaborated that “The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system.”
Huang’s legal team intends on using Elluswany’s testimony to help prove that Tesla’s “ineffective monitoring of driver engagement” had contributed to the crash, according to Reuters.
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