Netizens roast Tesla’s Indian-origin VP Ashok Elluswamy over ‘obvious solution’ to self-driving issue

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software and a key figure behind the company’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems, has come under sharp online scrutiny following remarks he made about what he described as an “obvious” solution to Tesla’s long-running self-driving challenges.

Speaking on January 29 at the 2026 ScaledML Conference, presented by Matroid, Elluswamy addressed a forum on building end-to-end foundational models for autonomous driving. During the discussion, he doubled down on Tesla’s camera-only approach, dismissing the need for additional sensors such as lidar.

“It’s so obvious you can solve this with cameras. Why wouldn’t you solve with cameras? It’s 2026. The self-driving problem is not a sensor problem, it’s an AI problem. The cameras have enough information already. It’s a problem of extracting the information, which is an AI problem,” Elluswamy said.

Tesla has long maintained that its end-to-end neural network—trained on raw camera feeds and vehicle data collected from billions of miles driven by its fleet—can outperform human drivers. The company has claimed its system is “2x safer than human drivers,” while arguing that large-scale data collection helps address rare and unpredictable “long-tail” driving scenarios.

However, Elluswamy’s comments landed at a time when Tesla’s self-driving technology remains under regulatory and public scrutiny.

In October last year, US federal regulators opened another investigation into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature following dozens of reported incidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was examining 58 cases in which Teslas allegedly violated traffic safety laws while using FSD, including running red lights and driving on the wrong side of the road. The incidents reportedly led to more than a dozen crashes, fires, and nearly two dozen injuries.

Against that backdrop, Elluswamy’s assertion that cameras alone are sufficient did not sit well with many online observers. In comment sections across social media, critics questioned why Tesla has yet to deliver fully unsupervised robotaxis despite making similar promises for over a decade. Others contrasted Tesla’s approach with competitors like Waymo, which uses lidar and already operates commercial driverless services in multiple US cities.

Some users also pointed to Tesla’s own hardware evolution, questioning why newer vehicles required higher-resolution cameras if existing ones already contained all the necessary information.

One user wrote sarcastically, “Yeah, but has Ashok checked with all of the keyboard experts on here before making such claims??”

Another was more blunt, saying, “What a load of bs. Vision only cannot even detect potholes. Meanwhile this isnt a problem for Waymo.”

A third commenter highlighted what they saw as a familiar pattern in Tesla’s messaging: “Notice he said ‘can solve’ not ‘has been solved’ It’s always a ‘next year’ for Tesla.”