A report made by Bloombergafter having access to internal emails of the Tesla companyconfirmed that Elon Muskoverestimated the capabilities of Autopilot, the driver assistance system from the car manufacturer.
According to the same e-mails, the executive director himself was responsible for dictate the opening tagline that was present in a 2016 video that claimed Tesla’s car was driving itself.
That revelation comes after an engineer, Ashok Elluswamy, director of autopilot software at the company, revealed this week that the vehicle actually followed a predetermined route along a high-definition map.
One day before the video was unveiled, on October 19, 2016, Musk claimed on the company’s official blog that all cars would ship with the hardware that would make full autonomous driving possible. That same month, according to the Bloomberg revelation, the emails that the billionaire sent to his workers stressed the importance of the demonstration that promoted the system.
For example, in an email sent on October 11, 2016, Elon Musk defined as “absolute priority” the need for the Autopilot team to concentrate as much as possible on the development of the video. In fact, the tycoon suggested that he had canceled his weekend plans for that task.
“I just want to make it absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is to get an amazing Autopilot demo unit,” Musk said, according to what was revealed by Bloomberg. “Since this is a demo, it’s okay to code part of it, as we’ll populate it with production code later in an OTA update,” he added, pointing to the use of a 3D digital map that accompanied the scrolling of a Model. X via a default path.
At another point, he explains that he would publicly state that “this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon delivery.” Despite the above, other internal messages reveal that it was Musk himself who suggested that the video in question should begin with a particular message:
The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons.
He is not doing anything.
The car drives itself.
Later, through his Twitter accountMusk himself touted that: “Tesla drives itself (without any human intervention) through urban streets, from highway to streets, and then finds a place to park.”
Consider that Ashok Elluswamy had to testify as part of a lawsuit against Tesla for a fatal crash in 2018 that killed an Apple engineer named Walter Huang. In that process, the engineer stated that Tesla probably should have clarified that, during the filming of the video, “the Model X crashed into a fence.”
Over the past several years, Tesla has been the target of multiple criticisms for the capabilities of its driver assistant, as Tesla vehicles have been involved in several accidents.
In addition, this whole situation is part of a scenario of distrust and a drop in the reputation of a billionaire whose fortune fell significantly over the past year. Not only is there his controversial handling of Twitter, and the lawsuit he will face over a tweet in which he said he would make Tesla go private, but also the low economic results of the auto company that has seen the value of its shares by more than 60%.