A 2016 commercial in which a Tesla car is allegedly controlled only by the driver assistance system (here’s this one) was staged, the automaker’s director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, told the court.
In a recent statement, Elluswamy said the video, titled “Fully Autonomous Driving on All Teslas,” was meant to show “what can be built for the system,” not what customers might expect from it.
The video, which the automaker’s CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter with the caption “Tesla is driving itself,” shows the car driving and parking itself without intervention, avoiding obstacles and taking into account the red or green color of traffic lights.
The clip begins with a screen saver in which it is said that “the person is in the driver’s seat only because of the requirements of the law,” but “he is not doing anything there, the car is driving itself.”
According to Eluswamy, the promo was “specific to a predetermined route” compared to the production version of the technology, which simply relied on inputs from cameras and sensors.
“The technology used additional, pre-prepared information for driving,” he told lawyers, adding that the route the car followed had previously been plotted on a 3D map.
In other words, Tesla’s autopilot could not plan the route so dynamically – instead, the company’s engineers created it independently for advertising purposes.
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The New York Times previously reported on the preliminary development of the autopilot card and noted that the user would not have such a privilege. So far, the journalists’ investigation has received confirmation from an official representative of Tesla. Elluswamy was working as an engineer at the time of the video and was involved in the promo team.
Elluswamy testified as part of a lawsuit filed by the family of Wei Huang, who died in 2018 when his Model X, with Autopilot on, crashed into a highway guardrail.
Tesla Autopilot is accused of a large-scale accident involving 8 cars in California: 9 people were injured, including a child
Elluswamy also said that the version of Autopilot that was available at the time the video was made “couldn’t respond to a traffic light” – even though it was shown in the video. He added that he “doesn’t remember if there was a person in the driver’s seat controlling the acceleration/braking or if the car was doing it.”
However, the admission that the promo was staged is not the only surprising thing about Elluswamy’s statement. Mahmoud Hikmet, head of research and development at Ohmio Automation, highlighted parts of the transcript where Eluswamy said he was unaware of fundamental aspects of security such as the Operational Design Domain, also known as ODD. This definition refers to situations such as geography or weather under which an autonomous vehicle is allowed to operate (for example, if a car is only capable of driving in a certain city under ideal weather conditions, then a rainy day in another city would be outside of its ODD).
Granted, it’s a phrase you’re unlikely to hear in everyday communication or advertising materials, but it’s one you’d definitely expect to hear from someone who works on autopilot. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the organization behind the levels of autonomy that Tesla itself has referenced, calls ODD “the key to autonomous vehicle safety.”
During an appearance on a podcast with Lex Friedman, Musk appeared to be dismissive of ODD. He said the acronym “sounds like ADD” and then responded to a question about Tesla’s philosophy of wide-ranging ODD, saying it’s “pretty crazy” to let people drive cars instead of machines.
Musk’s car company is currently facing lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny over its driver assistance systems. In September, Tesla car owners filed a class-action lawsuit against the automaker for “misleading the public about Autopilot technology and Fully Self-Driving (FSD) features.” The company later filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit because it believes “the failure to realize a long-term desired goal does not constitute fraud.” In December, a US court ordered Tesla to modernize a customer’s car at its own expense due to “deceptive advertising” of a full-fledged autopilot.
Earlier this year, NHTSA issued a report on crashes involving vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), with Tesla topping the list.
Recently, YouTuber Marques Brownlee tested the Tesla FSD and evaluated its capabilities. During the trip to New Jersey, moving on expressways and roads within city limits, Marquez tried not to interfere with the controls, and yet in several episodes the system failed.
“It’s a lot of stress and we’re still a long way from robotaxis” – Marquez Brownlee about Tesla’s latest FSD autopilot, which is still in beta [Видео]
Source: The Verge
