A Tesla employee claims one of the Autopilot demo videos is fabricated

Electric car maker Tesla has had a lot of trouble thanks to the names of its driving assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Drive. Now another new problem has been added – a Tesla engineer claims that the video published in 2016, in which the Tesla car finds a parking space and parks itself, is actually staged and does not correspond to the truth. You can see the video here.

At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also used this video to make one of his loud claims, in this case, “Tesla drives itself.” Tesla engineer and Autopilot program director Ashok Allaswamy testified that the video was fabricated. He gave such a testimony in the trial against Tesla, which was started for an accident with fatalities in 2018. The accident killed programmer Walter Huang and his family is continuing legal proceedings against the automaker.

Already in 2021 The New York Post in the publication, an anonymous Tesla source said that the specific route had already been programmed in advance, and that the car shown in the video actually crashed during filming. The engineer states that the purpose of the video was not to show what the machine is capable of doing at that particular moment in 2016, but to demonstrate what is generally possible to build into the system.

The family of the deceased programmer sued Tesla because they believe that Tesla’s Autopilot system was to blame for the accident. An investigation conducted in 2020 found that the cause of the accident was distraction and limitations of the Autopilot system. Allaswami claimed that what was seen in the video did not match what the machine was actually capable of doing. Huang family lawyer Andrew McDevitt Reuters said that publishing such a video without any reservations and explanations from the producer’s side is irresponsible and misleading.

Of course, Tesla is far from the only car manufacturer that offers similar driving assistance systems, but Tesla cars have been involved in several fatal accidents while driving with this feature. Several lawsuits have been filed against the manufacturer and the US regulators are also investigating. Everything has gone so far that Tesla California can no longer advertise its cars as ‘self-driving’, if it is not true. And at the moment, a car in which a person could focus on something that no other simply has while driving. Although Tesla cars warn on the screen of the system’s limitations and the necessary actions, it has been repeatedly emphasized in different countries of the world that the words “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Drive” give drivers wrong associations and a wrong idea of ​​what this car can and cannot do.