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      Musk oversaw staged Tesla self-driving video, emails show

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 20 January, 2023 - 15:25 · 1 minute

    Elon Musk looking shifty, because he's shifty.

    Enlarge / Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at court during the SolarCity trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Musk was cool but combative as he testified in a Delaware courtroom that Tesla's more than $2 billion acquisition of SolarCity in 2016 wasn't a bailout of the struggling solar provider. Musk was triumphant in that case, but he's got plenty more legal trouble to wriggle out from. (credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    If there was any doubt that Tesla CEO Elon Musk knew the company's much-watched 2016 self-driving demo was staged, emails obtained by Bloomberg should lay that to rest. "Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive," Musk wrote in an email. "Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcode some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update."

    Musk saw little wrong with this strategy, saying, "I will be telling the world that this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon receipt," he wrote. But instead of making this clear, the video, released to the world via Musk's Twitter account , opens instead with white text on a black background telling the viewer that "the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."

    Musk took to Twitter on the day of the video's release to tell his followers that the car could read parking signs , and it knew not to park in a disabled spot. He also claimed that someone could use the "Summon" function on a car parked on the other side of the country.

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      Tesla staged 2016 self-driving demo, says senior Autopilot engineer

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 17 January, 2023 - 20:32 · 1 minute

    A crashed sedan has been torn in half.

    Enlarge / Walter Huang's Model X in a tow yard days after his fatal crash. (credit: NTSB )

    Tesla's widely viewed 2016 Autopilot demonstration video showing the system stopping for red lights and moving off again when the light changed to green was faked, according to the director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy. Elluswamy made the statement under oath during a deposition for a lawsuit brought against Tesla following the fatal crash of Apple engineer Walter Huang in 2018 .

    The video, posted in October 2016 and still available on Tesla's website , begins with the caption: "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." We then see a Tesla Model X leave a garage, and a driver enters the car as The Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black" begins to play.

    The heavily edited video then shows the Model X driving around, stopping for road junctions and red lights. All the while, the human in the driver's seat has his hands near but not on the steering wheel. Upon reaching a Tesla facility, the human leaves the Model X, which goes off to park itself, avoiding running over a pedestrian in the process.

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