SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the you-weren't-supposed-to-take-us-literally dept.
The claim was made in a lawsuit over Walter Huang's fatal Model X crash in 2018:
Tesla's widely viewed 2016 Autopilot demonstration video showing the system stopping for red lights and moving off again when the light changed to green was faked, according to the director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy. Elluswamy made the statement under oath during a deposition for a lawsuit brought against Tesla following the fatal crash of Apple engineer Walter Huang in 2018.
The video, posted in October 2016 and still available on Tesla's website, begins with the caption: "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." We then see a Tesla Model X leave a garage, and a driver enters the car as The Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black" begins to play.
[...] At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicized the video via his Twitter account, telling the world that "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot." Musk went on to add that "8 cameras, 12 ultrasonars and radar all flush mounted and body color. Beauty remains."
[...] But the Model X in the video was preprogrammed to drive from Menlo Park to Palo Alto, according to Elluswamy, who was a senior software engineer in 2019 before being promoted to head all Autopilot software development in 2019.
"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system," Elluswamy said in his testimony, according to Reuters. 3D maps were used to pre-program the route, including where to stop, and during the self-parking demo a Tesla crashed into a fence, Elluswamy said.
The fatal crash occurred on Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, in March 2018 when Huang's Model X, operating under Autopilot, swerved into a highway crash attenuator at more than 70 mph. Tesla blamed Huang for the crash, claiming he was not paying attention. But according to the National Transportation Safety Board, Huang had repeatedly complained to friends and family about his car's propensity to swerve at that particular crash barrier in the past. The National Transportation Safety Board had harsh words for Tesla, CalTrans, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, all of which shared blame for the death, it said in 2020.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Sunday January 22 2023, @07:22AM (2 children)
Bearings don't last forever. Some electric motors fail when the bearings run out of lubricant.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2023, @02:49AM
Lubricant fail:
First thing I look at when someone brings me a failed piece of stuff. Blow on the fan!
If the fan spins, I have a fighting chance of making the thing work. I used to routinely, on my stuff, lubricate the fan bearings of my stuff. The old stuff wasn't hard to get to, and a bottle of fine silicone oil and a box of insulin syringes went a long way
Corporate took over, I lost control of my tools and equipment,. Everything went outsource. Nobody seemed to know what did what anymore. The old guys ( me included ) became unwanted burdens as we were quite argumentative about what we considered unnecessary changes.
We lost the engineers who built the company, replaced by those holding degrees in marketing, butt kissing, and assholery.
The company soon fell apart, with our labs razed to build new warehouses for imported goods. The fancy administration building was kept. Its now a church, which is fitting, to beat our swords into ploughshares.
All of our equipment is gone. I wonder if they kept the corporate barber shop intact.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 26 2023, @08:14PM
I believe I mentioned above that at age 70, I've seen exactly two electric motors fail. One was an antique box fan with a bad capacitor which is no longer used, and the other was a broken plastic piece in a cassette deck motor I repaired with super glue.
Yes, nothing lasts forever, but a machine with one moving part (electric motor) against a machine with thousands of moving parts (gasoline engine) is no contest at all. Two failures in 70 years is a pretty damned good track record. Oh, neither motor failure had anything to do with lubrication.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org