Tesla staged a 2016 promotional video showcasing the vehicle's ability to drive autonomously, according to the transcript from a July 2022 deposition that was recently seen by Reuters.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's current director of Autopilot software, was deposed in the case, which concerns the death of a Tesla driver in 2018.
The video, which is still up on the Tesla website, features about four minutes of footage of a Tesla "driving itself" from one location to another while the song "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones plays. The camera focuses on the steering wheel moving itself while a driver lightly cups it without ever intervening.
"The driver is only there for legal reasons," says a disclaimer at the beginning of the video. "He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." Elon Musk tweeted the video on the same day it published on the Tesla website.
"I believe the intent of the video was to showcase the potential of the system," Elluswamy said during the deposition. "The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016."
It took several attempts to get one continuous take of the car driving with no human intervention, even though the vehicle was driving a pre-determined, pre-mapped route from a home in Menlo Park to the Tesla parking lot. However, the video does not disclose that methodology, nor do viewers know that at one point during filming the vehicle crashed into a fence in the Tesla parking lot, according to Elluswamy, who has worked at Tesla for just over nine years and has been the director of Autopilot software for three years.
His deposition confirms a 2021 New York Times New York Times report, which cited anonymous sources. It's the first time a Tesla employee has "detailed how the video was produced," Reuters says.
The case involves a 2018 incident in which Walter Huang, an engineer at Apple, was killed after his Tesla Model X crashed in Mountain View, California. His family sued Tesla in 2019, and the case appears to be ongoing.
In 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded the crash was caused by a combination of Huang being distracted and issues with the Autopilot system, Reuters reports.
Tesla drivers are expected to keep their hands on the wheel and remain attentive when Autopilot features are enabled. But when Elluswamy was asked if it's possible to place any object (a banana, for example) on the steering wheel to trick the system, Elluswamy confirmed that "It is possible to fool the system."
"So, yes, you can do something to trick the system into thinking that you're paying attention when you're not paying attention," he said.
Mahmood Hikmet, an engineer at New Zealand-based autonomous vehicle company Ohmio Automotion, took to Twitter to analyze Elluswamy's deposition. He found his lack of knowledge, or at least expressed knowledge, on the basics of autonomous systems appalling.
Tesla disclosed two more fatal, Autopilot-related crashes as recently as November 2022. Earlier this month, a video surfaced of a Tesla Model S in Full Self Driving mode abruptly braking and causing a non-fatal 8-car pileup. Federal investigations of these instances are ongoing, though the state of California, where the majority of US Tesla owners reside, already banned the company from calling its autonomous technology Full Self-Driving.