The video came out in 2016
Tesla may be in serious trouble. It turned out that in 2016 Tesla released a staged video where her car was controlled by the FSD autopilot system.
Ashok Elluswamy, head of the Tesla autopilot software division, told about such manipulation. Of course, in a normal situation, he would hardly have admitted this, but he had to do this as part of his testimony in the case of a fatal accident in 2018. It is worth noting that Elluswami gave testimony last summer, but the data was made public only now.
According to him, that very video was intended to “show the possibility of building such an autopilot system,” and not to convince customers that Tesla’s production cars will have such capabilities. True, the company “forgot” to at least somehow hint at this.
The staging of that video was that the demonstrated Tesla car did not move by itself, focusing on sensors and cameras. “Additional pre-mapped information was used for driving.” That is, the car was simply assigned a specific route to the system – in fact, no autopilot worked at all.
Elluswami added that the version of the FSD autopilot that was available to Tesla at the time of the infamous video did not allow the car to respond to traffic lights, although this was shown in the video.
In fact, we can say that Tesla deceived customers, and its actions are not very different from the actions of Nikola, which at one time got into a scandal because it turned out that for its advertising the company rolled a non-working electric truck down the mountain.
Whether Tesla faces any consequences after the publication of such confessions is unclear, but someone may well sue the company.
