Revealed: Tesla 2016 video promoting self-driving was staged

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A senior engineer revealed that a 2016 video used by Tesla to showcase its self-driving technology was produced to depict capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have.

The video, which is still available on Tesla's website, was produced in October 2016 and pushed on Twitter by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as proof that "Tesla drives itself."

However, the Model X was not driving itself using Tesla technology, according to Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's director of Autopilot software, in a transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal collision involving a former Apple worker.

Elluswamy's unreported statement is the first time a Tesla employee has acknowledged and discussed how the film was created.

"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons," says the slogan of the video. He is not acting in any way. "The automobile drives itself."

According to Elluswamy, Tesla's Autopilot team set out to design and record a "demonstration of the system's capabilities" at Musk's request.

Elluswamy, Musk, and Tesla have all declined to comment, according to Reuters. However, the company has advised drivers that while using Autopilot, they must keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicles.

The Tesla technology is designed to assist with steering, braking, speed, and lane changes but its features “do not make the vehicle autonomous,” the company claims on its website.

Tesla employed 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla's then-headquarters in Palo Alto to generate the film, he claimed.

“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,” Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his testimony.

The US Department of Justice began a criminal investigation into Tesla’s claims that its electric vehicles can drive themselves in 2021, after a number of crashes, some of them fatal, involving Autopilot.

According to unidentified sources, the New York Times claimed in 2021 that Tesla engineers prepared the 2016 film to promote Autopilot without mentioning that the route had been planned in advance or that a car had crashed while attempting to complete the shoot.