The car drives itself, but it’s just a staging: the 2016 Tesla video under indictment

A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology, and which is still featured on the automaker’s official website today, showed capabilities — such as stopping at a red light and accelerating to green — that the system actually he had not, according to a transcript of a deposition by Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, heard following a 2018 lawsuit brought against Musk’s company.

This testimony – writes the Reuters agency – represents the first time that a Tesla employee confirms and explains in detail how the video in question was made.

Already in 2021, in fact, the New York Times had advanced the hypothesis – citing anonymous fakes – that the video had been shot on a road carefully mapped previously by Tesla. Elluswamy confirmed that to make the video, Tesla engineers used a 3D mapping of the route that took the prototype car from a home in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto. But at the time, the Tesla Model X wasn’t capable of self-driving with the technology Tesla claimed to have developed, Elluswamy said.

“The intent of the video was not to accurately describe what customers could access in 2016, just to tell how the system could be interrogated.” Tesla calls its driving system “Full Self-Driving” but specifies, also on its official website, that this does not make its vehicles fully autonomous. And that the driver must keep his hands on the wheel.

An investigation is underway by Nhtsa, the US federal agency that deals with road safety, on what Tesla claimed in 2021 – namely that its cars could drive themselves – following a series of accidents involving vehicles of the company.