Tesla, the Autopilot 2.0 video was fake?

Tesla

In recent days, an accusation against Tesla has been circulating online from a group of former engineers of Elon Musk's company, according to which one of the most famous promotional videos dedicated to the Autopilot 2.0 system would have been heavily manipulated and falsified in order to make the proposed feature is more appealing.

In a statement released to the New York Times, two members of the engineering team who worked on Autopilot stated that while shooting the video the car would use a three-dimensional digital map loaded previously, a feature that is not available to customers using Autopilot. In addition, it seems that during the filming of the video the car hit a guard rail with Autopilot on, forcing a break in filming to make repairs; needless to say that the part of the collision was never used in the promotional video.

The video in question, still available online and now very clicked after more than 4 years (we report it at the bottom), is between the main promoters of the Autopilot 2.0 function released in October 2016: on that occasion Elon Musk indulged in decidedly optimistic statements that had generated discontent among the company's engineers, who knew the real state of development of the software, in their opinion a lot far from the promises made by Musk.

The CEO of the American company specializing in the production of electric cars has been accused several times of ignoring the opinion and concerns of its engineers, preferring instead to sell features that are not yet ready for the consumer market: In recent weeks the New York Times spoke to 19 people who have worked for Tesla in the past 10 years, collecting or many such testimonies.

The recent decision to abandon the use of radars has been among the most contested: according to Musk, if a human is able to drive a car using only his eyes, the car should be able to do the same thing using only cameras, while many other experts in the sector say they are against this point of view, considering the different capacities between the human eye and the lens of a video camera.

As often happens in these cases, Tesla did not comment on the news.

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Elon Musk, Happy With Tesla, Says SpaceX So Difficult, ‘I Wonder Whether We Can Do This’

ALEXANDER BECHER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, who just tweeted he was thinking about quitting his job, made headlines this week when he criticized the government’s effort to encourage electric-vehicle adoption, including clauses in the Build Back Better Act. The criticism was viewed by many as a way to signal Tesla’s maturity and success.

See: Tesla Tops Delivery Expectations Despite Global Supply Chain IssuesFind: Experts Say SpaceX Might Make Musk a Trillionaire, But Tesla Just Boosted His Worth $25 Billion

“Thinking of quitting my jobs & becoming an influencer full-time wdyt,” Musk tweeted on Dec. 9.

However, it’s his other company, SpaceX, that seems to be giving him more trouble. Speaking remotely at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Conference, Musk’s remarks on how difficult a task it’s been to develop Starship — the next-generation vehicle the company plans to use to take humans to the Moon and Mars — sounded a lot like Tesla’s early difficulties with the Model 3, Bloomberg reported.

Starship “absorbs more of my mental energy than probably any other single thing,” Musk said Monday, according to Bloomberg. “It is so preposterously difficult, there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.”

In November, Space Explored reported an email Musk sent to employees in which he said that “what it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”

See: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Valuation Hits $100 Billion, Becomes Second Most-Valuable Private Company WorldwideFind: 10 Productivity Tips From Elon Musk That Can Put You on the Road to Success

Space Explored reported that Musk had planned to take a break over Thanksgiving weekend, but Raptor production issues changed that:

“Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this,” he said in the email. “I was going to take this weekend off, as my first weekend off in a long time, but instead, I will be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.”

Story continues

In contrast, Tesla has been on a tear this year, from exceeding deliveries despite chip shortages and supply chain disruptions, to its stock soaring, bringing the company to a $1 trillion market cap. In turn, Musk said earlier this month that he would participate in Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call — to take place in January 2022 — following his statement, made in July, that he would not be on the calls anymore “unless there’s something really important that I need to say.”

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Elon Musk, Happy With Tesla, Says SpaceX So Difficult, ‘I Wonder Whether We Can Do This’