Tesla video promoting self-driving staged, engineer testifies

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

To create the video, Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a home in Menlo Park, Calif., to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto, he said.

He said the drivers intervened to control the test runs. When trying to demonstrate that the Model X could park itself without a driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said.

“The purpose of the video was not to accurately represent what was available to users in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build in the system,” Eluswami said, referring to his testimony seen by Reuters. According to a transcript.

When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input) from urban street to highway to street, then finds a parking space.”

Tesla is facing lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny over its driver assistance system.

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

The New York Times reported in 2021 that Tesla engineers shot a 2016 video to promote Autopilot, without revealing whether the route was pre-mapped or a car crash trying to complete the shoot. was a victim of

When asked if the 2016 video showed the performance of the Tesla Autopilot system available in the production car at the time, Eluswami said, “It doesn’t.”

Eluswami was deposed in a lawsuit against Tesla over a 2018 crash in Mountain View, California, that killed Apple engineer Walter Huang.

Andrew McDevitt, a lawyer who represents Huang’s wife and who questioned Eluswami in July, told Reuters that “showing this video without a disclaimer or an asterisk is clearly misleading.”

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 2020 that Huang’s fatal crash was likely caused by his distraction and Autopilot limitations. It said Tesla’s “ineffective monitoring of driver engagement” contributed to the crash.

Drivers can “fool the system,” making the Tesla system believe they were paying attention based on steering wheel feedback when they weren’t, Alluswamy said. But he said he doesn’t see any safety issues with Autopilot if drivers are paying attention.