A 2016 video showing off Tesla’s then-new Autopilot feature was “staged” to show features not available to customers, a deposition by the director of the Autopilot software at Tesla recently revealed.
According to Reuters, Ashok Elluswamy gave the deposition in July 2022 for a lawsuit filed by the family of former Apple engineer Walter Huang, who was killed in a 2018 car accident. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash partially on the limitation of the Autopilot software.
The 2016 video, which is still available on Tesla’s website, starts with the tagline: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” The footage then shows a Model X Tesla pulling out of a garage and driving to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The driver keeps his fingers lightly on the steering wheel during the video but does not take control of the car.
The advert ends with the vehicle dropping the driver off at Tesla’s headquarters before parallel parking itself between two cars.
But Elluswamy testified that Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route to make the video and during testing, drivers had to intervene. He also stated the car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot.
According to Elluswamy, the video also showed off features that had not yet been developed, including stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light. The Reuters article covering the testimony did not state how those features were simulated in the video.
Elluswamy said the video - created at the request of Tesla CEO Elon Musk - “does not” show what was available to Tesla drivers at the time.
“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 stated in his testimony.
The video does not include a disclaimer that some features were not yet available, or that the car was not fully self-driving.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source told them the video used a pre-mapped route, and that the vehicle crashed while making the video. Elluswamy’s testimony seems to back that report.
Tesla’s Autopilot feature was one of the flagpole features of the Tesla vehicles, though the company warns on its website that drivers must pay attention to the road and keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times.
The National Transportation Safety Board blamed Huang’s crash on his inattentiveness and the limitations of the Autopilot feature. Elluswamy said in his testimony that drivers could “fool the system” into thinking they were paying attention but said he saw no safety issues if drivers were focused on the road.
Autopilot has been both a boon for Tesla - resulting in countless automotive and technology websites covering the feature - and a headache, with multiple active lawsuits related to the feature and issues with regulators.
The US Department of Justice opened a probe into the Autopilot feature in 2021, after multiple crashes involving the system, including some that were fatal.
Meanwhile, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has accused the company of “deceptive practices” in its advertising of the feature.
“Instead of simply identifying product or brand names, these ‘Autopilot’ and ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’ labels and descriptions represent that vehicles equipped with the ADAS [Automated Driver Assist System] features will operate as an autonomous vehicle, but vehicles equipped with those ADAS features could not at the time of those advertisements, and cannot now, operate as autonomous vehicles,” attorneys for the DMV wrote in filings from July 2022.
Full Self-Driving (FSD) is an optional add-on to the Autopilot feature that launched in 2019, after being split from the Autopilot system. It enables some of the features seen in the original 2016 video, including self-driving in urban environments.
The base Autopilot feature currently only includes adaptive cruise control (which Tesla calls “Traffic-Aware Cruise Control”) and Autosteer. FSD enables Auto Lane Change, Autopark, Smart Summon, Traffic and Stop Sign Control, and Autosteer on City Streets. FSD can be enabled in most Tesla vehicles through software and costs an additional $15,000.
Tesla is not the only electric vehicle manufacturer to be caught faking videos. In 2020, Tesla competitor Nikola admitted it faked its video purporting to show an electric semi-truck running on its own power. The truck was actually rolling down a hill and the company used a low camera angle to obscure that. In October, Nikola founder Trevor Milton was convicted of fraud for deceiving investors.
Tesla has not commented on Elluswamy's testimony.