Tesla’s bogus claims: EV maker faked video of car’s autonomous driving capabilities, says lead engineer

The 2016 video that propelled Tesla as the first EV to crack complete autonomous driving was faked, according to testimony by a senior engineer, Reuters has reported.

The video shows a Tesla Model X driving on urban and suburban stress as well as the highway. The car evidently stopped at red light and accelerated away when the light turned green, all on its own. Reuters reported that the video is still on Tesla’s website, and has the caption: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

CEO Elon Musk used the video as evidence that Tesla “drives itself” by relying on its many built-in sensors and self-driving software. According to Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, the video was staged using 3D mapping on a predetermined route, a feature that is not available to consumers.

What this means, is that the car moved on a predetermined path that was fed to it using a 3D map of the area it was supposed to drive on. 

In his July deposition, which was taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a fatal 2018 crash involving former Apple engineer Walter Huang, Elluswamy said Musk wanted the Autopilot team to record “a demonstration of the system’s capabilities.”

Tesla is already facing a number of lawsuits and investigations around its Autopilot and FSD or Full Self-Driving capabilities. A confession of this sort, that too by one of the top engineers at the firm could cause trouble for the EV maker.

To be fair, neither Autopilot nor Tesla’s FSD is actually self-driving. They are higher levels of Advanced Driving-Assistance Systems or ADAS. ADAS automate certain driving tasks, but as Tesla has made clear on its website, drivers should stay alert and keep their hands on the steering wheel when the systems are engaged.

Tesla’s ‘fake’ video was created using 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s office in Palo Alto, according to Elluswamy. Although the car did go along the route on its own, mainly using cruise control, drivers had to intervene to take control during test runs. Apparently, among the scenes that were not included in the final published video, the test car that was supposedly driving itself, crashed in Tesla’s parking lot when trying to park itself without a driver.

“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 seen by Reuters.

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