A top Tesla engineer admits that at Elon Musk's request, he staged a misleading self-driving video

The infamous Nikola CEO was found guilty of defrauding investors in October after making false claims about his concept trucks ability to travel on roads using his own fuel cell technology However, the filming had been deftly staged in truth, it simply rolled downward with gravity doing all the work

Due to legal revelations in connection with a lawsuit filed by the family of Walter Huang, who died in an accident in 2018 while being driven by his Tesla, Musk may now be on the verge of his own scandal

According to statements that senior engineer Ashok Elluswamy made on Tuesday that were leaked to Reuters, Musk had Elluswamy record a promotional video in October 2016 that he was aware would give a false impression of the capabilities of his self-driving technology

Tesla claimed to show nearly four minutes of edited footage in which one of its cars expertly navigates itself from an employees garage all the way to a Tesla office before the person exits the vehicle and it parks itself on corporate grounds The footage was set to the Rolling Stones catchy song Paint It Black It was claimed that the employee operating the vehicle only was there for legal reasons

Tesla claimed to show nearly four minutes of edited footage in which one of its cars expertly navigates itself from an employees garage all the way to a Tesla office before the person exits the vehicle and it parks itself on corporate grounds The footage was set to the Rolling Stones catchy song Paint It Black It was claimed that the employee operating the vehicle only was there for legal reasons

As an alternative, Tesla created a three-dimensional route in advance to spare the car from having to deal with the difficult calculations needed during path planning In addition to drivers taking over during test runs, a test car crashed into a fence while trying to demonstrate how the car could park itself

The goal of the video, according to Elluswamy, was not to accurately portray what was offered to customers in 2016 It was intended to show what could be incorporated into the system

The issue is that this deceptive demonstration wasnt merely one of the countless random videos that Elon Musk posts to his Twitter account to provide fans with up-to-date information about his most recent endeavours

Instead, it was the very foundation of his arguments for the revolutionary AI technology known as full self-driving FSD, which gave Tesla its stock market reputation as a tech company rather than a lowly automaker

On the basis of this foundation laid in October 2016, the businessman began to develop his plans to market a feature that, in the future, he later asserted would transform a Tesla into that rarest of automobile unicorns an appreciating asset that would generate income for its owner as a robo-taxi At Teslas Autonomy Day in April 2019, he would go on to boast, Its financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla