Comment by SilverBirch

I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.

The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.

Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.