Elon Musk has been accused of ‘dishonesty’ by a Silicon Valley legend, who said he was deeply unimpressed by the South African-born billionaire’s inability to fulfill the promises he makes with Tesla.
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday that he felt cheated by Tesla.
A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer. The testimony was part of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple engineer.
Wozniak said he was unimpressed by the self-driving feature.
‘It makes mistakes all the time,’ he said. ‘It’s a horrible, frightening experience.’
The engineer said he disliked Musk’s attitude.
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, said that he was unimpressed with Elon Musk
Wozniak said that Musk, pictured at a Tesla site in Berlin in September 2020, had over-promised with the cars
‘My life has been based on total honesty,’ he said.
‘Everything you say is totally honest. You don’t hide things, you don’t describe things, you don’t make things up to make yourself seem better.
‘A lot of honesty disappears when you look at Elon Musk and Tesla.’
Wozniak, who married his fourth wife, Janet Hill, in 2008, said believing Musk’s promises cost him and his family dearly.
‘They have robbed my family – myself and my wife – of so much money I couldn’t tell you, with things they said that we really believed would be real.’
Wozniak, asked whether he thought Musk and Jobs were similar, said they both were leaders of ‘a cult’ – which he felt was dangerous.
In 2019, Musk claimed that Teslas would turn into ‘robotaxis’ which were so advanced their owners ‘could go to sleep’ in the vehicle while it chauffeurs them around.
Musk is seen at the launch of the Tesla Model S in October 2011
Wozniak is seen driving his Tesla: he says the company has been a disappointment
The billionaire told customers that they could earn around $30,000 a year by allowing their Teslas to be used as part of a fleet of robotaxis.
As of now, customers in the U.S. and Canada who paid an extra $15,000 have a beta version of self-driving, but they must be behind the wheel.
‘Elon Musk said it would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016,’ Wozniak added.
Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the July transcript that Musk ordered the 2016 video to promote self-driving, even though it was not ready.
The video carries a tagline saying: ‘The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’
Elluswamy said Tesla’s Autopilot team set out to engineer and record a ‘demonstration of the system’s capabilities’ at the request of Musk.
To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto, he said.
Drivers intervened to take control in test runs, he said.
When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said.
‘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, according to a transcript of his testimony seen by Reuters.
When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted: ‘Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.’
Tesla faces lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny over its driver assistance systems.
Musk is seen in 2015 unveiling the Model X SUV in California
The U.S. Department of Justice began a criminal investigation into Tesla’s claims that its electric vehicles can drive themselves in 2021, after a number of crashes, some of them fatal, involving Autopilot.
The New York Times reported in 2021 that Tesla engineers had created the 2016 video to promote Autopilot without disclosing that the route had been mapped in advance or that a car had crashed in trying to complete the shoot, citing anonymous sources.
When asked if the 2016 video showed the performance of the Tesla Autopilot system available in a production car at the time, Elluswamy said, ‘It does not.’
Elluswamy was deposed in a lawsuit against Tesla over a 2018 crash in Mountain View, California, that killed Apple engineer Walter Huang.
Andrew McDevitt, the lawyer who represents Huang’s wife and who questioned Elluswamy’s in July, told Reuters it was ‘obviously misleading to feature that video without any disclaimer or asterisk.’
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 2020 that Huang’s fatal crash was likely caused by his distraction and the limitations of Autopilot.
It said Tesla’s ‘ineffective monitoring of driver engagement’ had contributed to the crash.
Elluswamy said drivers could ‘fool the system,’ making a Tesla system believe that they were paying attention based on feedback from the steering wheel when they were not.
But he said he saw no safety issue with Autopilot if drivers were paying attention.
