Elon Musk’s relationship with the truth is known to be, well, let’s say complicated, and Tesla has been the most perfect example of this for many years. We have already talked on other occasions about what we might call Tesla’s two speeds. The first, important, fundamental one is the one that characterizes the work of its engineering teams and that surprises us over the years with its ability to innovate.

The next speed, you can imagine it by now, is the one determined by Elon Musk’s statements.

If you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs back then, you’ll remember his interesting description of the reality-distorting effect that was happening around him. For some reason, or rather a mixture of several, what was possible and what wasn’t blurred when he was around, and according to his biographer, it led Apple workers to go further and sometimes achieve what seemed impossible.

I’ve been thinking for some time that after reading Jobs’ biography (I take it for granted that he did, of course), Elon Musk wanted to emulate the creator of Apple by turning his words into reality in the same way that Jobs did. . But of course Musk is no Jobs, however much some insist on comparing them, so where the pioneer was able to promote deeds, Musk remains in the role of lying.

The race toward autonomous driving, which many saw as spring in the middle of the last decade, has become a marathon in which speed is important, but resilience and consistency are key. Grandiose statements are useless if what they claim is not confirmed over time. In this regard, we told you just two days ago that Mercedes had reached level 3 autonomous driving before Tesla, despite Elon Musk saying at the beginning of 2021 that Tesla would achieve it by the end of this year, a blow to the company’s image that comes just as when some regulators grew weary of the company’s spread of smoke.

And if that wasn’t enough, today we know from Business Insider Tesla suffered a collision in Autopilot mode just as a commercial for the feature was being filmed. Of course, the footage was edited so that there was no indication that an accident had occurred (the car hit a fence while trying to park) and yet the company published the video on its website, where it remains today.

In the video overlay, we can read “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. It does nothing. The car drives itself’, but the truth is that the person sitting in the driver’s seat actually had to perform a maneuver in which the Autopilot mode suffered a collision. In addition, according to the same source cited in the article, the entire route that Tesla made autonomously was previously mapped in 3D by the company, so the car knew exactly to the millimeter what route to follow and what it would find. alone in it.