Elon Musk personally dictated the opening text of Tesla self-driving video

Hot on the heels of the latest revelations about the infamous Tesla self-driving video being staged, Elon Musk’s personal emails show the CEO was instrumental in creation and promotion of the video. Bloomberg reports that it had access to those emails and sheds some light on behind-the-scenes going-ons.

According to those emails, Elon Musk, known for his round-the-clock working approach, sent an email at 2am to the Autopilot team. In that email he stated:

Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive. Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcore some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update.

What he meant was that it’s OK for the engineers to create a stand-alone code, a one-off for the test vehicle in order to exaggerate its performance. He meant it was OK to re-shoot and re-attempt any failed driving sections and cut and splice the video in order to present a picture-perfect final product.

There is nothing wrong with that, in the end it was meant to be a demo of what the Autopilot can be capable of at some point in the future. It’s OK to make a sci-fi movie, not an issue - everybody loves Star Trek. What is not OK is trying to pass Star Trek as a news report.

Elon Musk continued in his email:

I will be telling the world that this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon receipt.

If he only stuck to his promise, there would never be an issue. There would be no drama, possibly Tesla shares wouldn’t go as high as they did right after he went public with the video via his favorite, and now his own, Twitter.

It has been over 6 years since that video went public, the company has been using it to promote the Autopilot and the FSD and yet to this day, none of the Tesla cars can do - safely - what the Tesla Model X did back then.

Sure, it’s not easy to come up with a self-driving car, the whole world knows it. It was Elon Musk who claimed Tesla has done it and unfortunately too many people trusted him. There is no denying it’s an awesome tool, Teslas are awesome electric cars and the company itself can be held responsible for bringing the EV revolution about.

The point is, that based on an exaggerated video, promoted by the CEO as the real-deal way too many people took their hands off the steering wheel. Many investors poured the money into Tesla believing it had the technology while in reality, all it had was a dream. And that, for a CEO of a global EV leader, is a serious misstep. We are bound to find out more in the coming weeks as the numerous court proceedings go ahead and the truth slowly comes out.

Via