Thread by @evirae

Elon Musk oversaw the creation of a 2016 video that exaggerated the abilities of Tesla Inc.’s driver-assistance system Autopilot, even dictating the opening text that claimed the company’s car drove itself, according to internal emails viewed by Bloomberg. $TSLAQ

https://twitter.com/danahull/status/1616164957305049089

Musk wrote to Tesla’s Autopilot team after 2 a.m. California time in October 2016 to emphasize the importance of a demonstration drive to promote the system, which the chief executive officer made a splashy announcement about a week later.

The email sheds light on Musk’s mindset before he and Tesla then made claims about capabilities that have yet to materialize more than six years later.

In October, Bloomberg News reported that prosecutors in the US DOJ offices in WA/CA , along w/ the SEC, were were probing whether the company made misleading statements about its vehicles’ automated-driving capabilities. $TSLAQ

BIG POINT:

Nine days later, after Tesla staffers shared a fourth version of the video, Musk replied that there were still too many jump cuts, and that the demo footage “needs to feel like one continuous take.” $TSLAQ

While Musk had written in the earlier email that he would be clear Tesla was demonstrating what its cars would be able to do in the future, he then instructed staffers to open the video with a black screen and three sentences referring to the present.

The almost four-minute-long video that Musk shared in a tweet later that day opens with the text he asked for:

“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons.
He is not doing anything.
The car is driving itself.”

$TSLAQ #fraud

Tesla and Musk didn’t disclose when releasing the video that engineers had created a three-dimensional digital map for the route the Model X took, Elluswamy said during his deposition. Musk said years after the demo that the company doesn’t rely on high-definition maps. $TSLAQ

NHTSA has two active investigations into whether Autopilot is defective. It upgraded the first — focused on how Tesla Autopilot handles crash scenes with first-responder vehicles — in June of last year. It initiated the other — pertaining to sudden braking — four months earlier.