Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, promoted the video, which is still archived on the company’s website, on Twitter in October 2016 as proof that Tesla drives itself.
Tesla’s director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, stated in the transcript of a deposition taken in July that was used as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla. For a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple (NASDAQ: engineer for AAPL).
Tesla was staged Engineer testifies:
Elluswamy’s testimony, which was not reported before, is the first time a Tesla employee has confirmed and explained how the video was made.
The following is the tagline for the video, the driver is only in the vehicle for legal reasons. He is acting inactively. The vehicle drives itself. According to Elluswamy, Musk asked Tesla’s Autopilot team to engineer and record a “demonstration of the system’s capabilities.”
Tesla, Elluswamy, and Musk did not respond to a request for clarification. However, the company has informed
He claimed that Tesla utilized 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a residence in Menlo Park, California. To Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto to create the video.
That driver intervened to take control during test runs. He claimed that a test vehicle in Tesla’s parking lot struck a fence to demonstrate that the Model X could park itself without a driver.
The purpose of the video was not to accurately depict what 2016 had to offer. According to a Reuters-viewed Elluswamy stated, “It was to portray what was possible to build into the system.”
Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) through urban streets to the highway to streets, then finds a parking spot” shortly after Tesla released the video.
Tesla’s driver assistance systems are the subject of lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny.
According to Reuters, several crashes involving Autopilot, some of which resulted in fatalities, prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to begin a criminal investigation into Tesla’s claims that its electric vehicles can drive themselves in 2021.
In 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Huang’s distraction and Autopilot’s limitations likely contributed to his fatal crash.
According to Elluswamy, drivers could “fool the system,” causing the Tesla system to believe that drivers’ feedback from the steering wheel. However, he stated that if drivers were paying attention, Autopilot did not pose any safety concerns.