According to a Tesla engineer, the 2016 video, now archived, that the company used to promote its autonomous driving technology (Autopilot) was staged. The purpose of the vid was to show features such as stopping at red lights and accelerating at green lights, which the system did not have, Reuters writes.

CEO Ilon Musk cited the video as proof that “the Tesla car does without a driver.” However, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said as testimony in a lawsuit against Tesla over a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) engineer, the Model X did not use the technology in question.

Tesla’s technology is designed to assist with steering, braking, speed and lane change, but its features “do not make the vehicle autonomous,” according to a notice on the company’s website. However, this is the first time a Tesla employee has confirmed and detailed how such a video was created. The Tesla Autopilot team began developing and recording a demonstration of the autonomous driving system’s capabilities at Musk’s request. Tesla did warn drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their cars when using the technology.

Tesla used 3D mapping of a predetermined route from a home in Menlo Park, California to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto to create the video. Drivers had to rely on themselves during test runs, however. In an attempt to show that the Model X could park without a driver, a test car crashed into a fence in a Tesla parking lot.

However, Tesla has had to face lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny because of the driver assistance system. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation in 2021 into Tesla’s claims that its electric cars could self-drive after a series of accidents, including fatal ones.

In 2021, the New York Times reported that Tesla engineers created a 2016 video to promote the Autopilot system but failed to notify customers that the route had been mapped in advance or that the car crashed while trying to complete the footage. The lawsuit against Tesla stemmed from a 2018 crash in Mountain View that killed Apple engineer Walter Huang.

Eventually, in 2020, the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the fatal crash was caused by him being distracted as well as the limited capabilities of the Autopilot system itself, and the accident was caused by Tesla’s ineffective monitoring of driving controls by the drivers themselves.