This is substantially true, by Tesla's own sworn account. The October 2016 video — a Model X appearing to drive itself to work while the person in the driver's seat only sat there — was captioned "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything." In July 2022 deposition testimony, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's director of Autopilot software, confirmed the run relied on 3D mapping of a specific pre-determined route (from a house in Menlo Park to Tesla's then-headquarters in Palo Alto) rather than general self-driving, that test drivers intervened during the runs, and that during an attempt to show the car parking itself it crashed into a fence. Elluswamy said the intent was "to portray what was possible to build into the system," not what the car could actually do for customers in 2016. The fair mitigation is that the capability eventually became real in a limited form: Tesla's Full Self-Driving is now a genuine (if still supervised) system, and Tesla runs a (still closely supervised) robotaxi service in Austin as of 2026. But that does not retroactively make the 2016 video honest — it presented a pre-mapped, human-assisted run as autonomous driving. Verdict: mostly-true — the 2016 demo was staged in the ways critics describe; the self-driving technology only became real years later.