Elon Fibbed: Senior Tesla Engineer Claims Company Faked ‘Full Self-Driving’ Autopilot Video

A senior Tesla engineer recently claimed during a legal deposition that a video published by Elon Musk’s electric car company in 2016 demonstrating its “full self-driving” system was faked.

CBS News reports that Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s director of Autopilot software, recently claimed that a 2016 video that was supposed to demonstrate the automaker’s self-driving capabilities was staged. The clip, which was published in a blog post from 2016 titled “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas,” depicts a Tesla car pulling out of a driveway, stopping at stop signs and traffic lights, driving on a highway, transporting a passenger to an office complex, and then parallel-parking itself.

The driver’s hands can be seen hovering just below the steering wheel throughout the video, with text on the screen in the video reinforcing: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

Elon Musk tweeted the demonstration and said, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all).” The footage was staged, according to testimony from a senior engineer at Tesla. The goal of the video, according to Ashok Elluswamy, the company’s director of Autopilot software, was to show what could be built into the system rather than to accurately represent what was available to customers in 2016.

According to Elluswamy, the car was following a predetermined path in the video, and drivers occasionally took over during test runs. He further testified that during attempts to show that the Model X vehicle could park itself, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot.

This information was revealed in a deposition given by Elluswamy as part of a lawsuit involving a Tesla driver who died in a 2018 accident. The lawsuit claims that Tesla misrepresented the safety of its self-driving systems by claiming that they were safer than they actually were. It was brought by the widow of Walter Huang, a 38-year-old Apple engineer who passed away in 2018 after his Tesla slammed into a highway median on California’s Highway 101. In a statement, the family’s attorney, Mark Fong, claimed that Tesla was “beta testing” its Autopilot software on actual drivers.

The trial for the lawsuit brought by the Huang family is set for March. Breitbart News will report on the trial which may include testimony from Elluswamy and from Musk himself.

Read more at CBS News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan