Tesla engineer says self-driving car video promoted by Elon Musk in 2016 was staged

Tesla is embroiled in a number of problems at present, none more serious than an investigation into the death of a former Apple engineer in 2018. They were killed when their Tesla crashed on a freeway in “autopilot” mode with the civil case. The investigation is a lawsuit to find out if Tesla is liable for the death.

Information revealed in the trial reveals that a senior engineer named Ashok Elluswamy has testified that information in a famous Tesla promotional video from 2016, in which the car was shown to stop and go at traffic lights as well as drive around, was not a real demonstration of the real abilities of the vehicle.

The video, archived on the Tesla website, says: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

“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.

While great advancements have been made in self-driving technology since the system is by no means safe, as shown by this leaked CCTV footage.

More legal issues for Tesla and Musk

This lawsuit coincides with another lawsuit relating to Tesla, though really it is aimed at Elon Musk. The case centres on 2018 tweets, saying that he would take Tesla private, raising the price of Tesla stock before send it way down once it came out that it was no longer his intention, if Musk meant it at all.

“The claim is that the investors felt that they were defrauded by Musk’s tweet, that he was considering taking Tesla private and critically, that he had funding secured for it,” Robert Bartlett, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Reuters. “That turned out not to be the case.”

Musk was forced to give up his role as Tesla chairman after the debacle.