Excerpt from the article: IANAL, but I have some experience with the plaintiff's side of product liability litigation and forensic engineering. This is an absolutely damning example of corporate...
Excerpt from the article:
Immediately after the wreck at 9:14 p.m. on April 25, 2019, the crucial data detailing how it unfolded was automatically uploaded to the company’s servers and stored in a vast central database, according to court documents. Tesla’s headquarters soon sent an automated message back to the car confirming that it had received the collision snapshot.
Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony.
In the time between the crash and the hacker’s intervention, according to testimony from a software engineer and manager on the Autopilot team, someone at Tesla probably took “affirmative action to delete” the copy of the data on the company’s central database, too, leaving investigators and the family without the information they believed they needed to piece together what happened.
About two months after the crash, Cpl. David Riso‚ then the Florida Highway Patrol’s lead traffic homicide investigator, walked into a Tesla service center in South Florida — a meeting arranged by one of Tesla’s lawyers — holding two parts from the mangled Tesla, court records say: the media control unit, a flat center screen used for navigation and other features, and the Autopilot control unit, a metal box that housed the crucial data and had cables hanging off it.
From there, a Tesla service technician worked to retrieve the information he could — plugging the media control unit into a different Tesla and surveying its contents on a computer.
That employee attested that he never powered on the Autopilot control unit, where the snapshot resided, court documents show, and focused on the media control unit instead. But according to documents, Tesla acknowledged that the Autopilot control unit transmitted data at the time of the police inspection. Tesla recanted its employee’s testimony “after discovering evidence inconsistent with his stated recollection of events,” it said.
Powering up that unit posed a major problem, said Alan Moore, an expert witness and forensic engineer who testified for the plaintiffs, launching “a number of automatic processes,” which can include updating software. “The problem is … all of this is happening in the treasure trove,” he said, putting the collision snapshot at risk.
At the service center that day, the service technician downloaded data to a thumb drive Riso had brought to the facility. But the employee immediately set expectations low, Riso told the jury last month.
He “told me it was corrupted even before he handed the thumb drive [back] to me,” Riso said in his testimony.
After years of trying and failing to retrieve this data from Tesla, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said, they finally hit a wall in 2024 and were preparing to go to trial without it. But in a last-ditch effort to find the snapshot that summer, they recovered the control units from the Florida Highway Patrol, which still had them in its possession. Then they needed a technical expert to understand and extract what was on them.
That’s when they turned to hacker greentheonly, who had a robust social media following for his work recovering data from damaged Teslas and posting his findings on X.
The hacker was consulting with the plaintiffs’ team when Tesla proposed to the plaintiffs that they power on the Autopilot control unit to determine what data it held — an idea greentheonly vehemently opposed.
“‘Let’s just power it on and update [it] and see what happens,’” he recalled them suggesting. “If I wanted to destroy evidence on the computer, that would be exactly the advice I would give.”
After a lengthy back-and-forth, Tesla and the plaintiffs agreed on terms for the hacker to access the data from the Autopilot unit himself. In October, the plaintiffs’ attorneys flew the hacker down to Miami from his home hundreds of miles away.
Inside a Starbucks near the Miami airport, the plaintiffs’ attorneys watched as greentheonly fired up his ThinkPad computer and plugged in a flash drive containing a forensic copy of the Autopilot unit’s contents. Within minutes, he found key data that was marked for deletion — along with confirmation that Tesla had received the collision snapshot within moments of the crash — proving the critical information should have actually been accessible all along.
IANAL, but I have some experience with the plaintiff's side of product liability litigation and forensic engineering. This is an absolutely damning example of corporate malfeasance in evidence destruction, and it's not surprising that the jury found against Tesla to the tune of a $243 million verdict. That will almost certainly be reduced on appeal.
I remain surprised that the U.S. National Transportation and Highway Safety Administration hasn't insisted on black box rules (e.g. third party escrow for crash data and vehicle memory on all self-driving systems, if not government holding) for software-on-wheels.
If the state police hadn't maintained custody of the vehicle data recorders, no one would have had any idea about the autonomous driving systems' contribution to the crash in the article, thanks to Tesla's efforts in data destruction.
The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) kept secret how unsafe the Boeing 737 Max was after the first crash despite being given the true data on MCAS. It wouldn't surprise me if other...
The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) kept secret how unsafe the Boeing 737 Max was after the first crash despite being given the true data on MCAS. It wouldn't surprise me if other American agencies are also complicit in hiding serious safety flaws in other American products and, in this case, they may already have this data and be sitting on it to protect the bottom-line.
Boeing was in a better position to enact regulatory capture of the FAA - there was little US competition in the product niche that the Boeing 700-series planes occupied. Tesla is an upstart and...
Boeing was in a better position to enact regulatory capture of the FAA - there was little US competition in the product niche that the Boeing 700-series planes occupied.
Tesla is an upstart and it's easy to see that other established U.S. automakers might have something to say about Tesla's commanding lead in autonomous driving.
This doesn't at all invalidate your point, but "upstart" doesn't really describe Tesla anymore. They've been selling cars for the greater part of a decade now and their most popular models eclipse...
This doesn't at all invalidate your point, but "upstart" doesn't really describe Tesla anymore. They've been selling cars for the greater part of a decade now and their most popular models eclipse every other EV in terms of sales.
That is an interesting point. It is frustrating that it often feels like only giant corporations have any political power, but among those are competitors to Tesla that could potentially gain...
That is an interesting point. It is frustrating that it often feels like only giant corporations have any political power, but among those are competitors to Tesla that could potentially gain value by lobbying for regulations that will hurt Tesla far more than themselves. This seems like it would be especially easy right now due to the falling out between Musk and this administration and record of problems like the one that started this thread to point to. American businesses do love regulatory capture, so while I don't necessarily think it will happen it seems like it plausibily could.
It's the main reason I've always been against Tesla and felt that this whole thing was a dangerous marketing escapade not a serious attempt at progress. Multiple admin's have been giving Tesla a...
I remain surprised that the U.S. National Transportation and Highway Safety Administration hasn't insisted on black box rules (e.g. third party escrow for crash data and vehicle memory on all self-driving systems, if not government holding) for software-on-wheels.
It's the main reason I've always been against Tesla and felt that this whole thing was a dangerous marketing escapade not a serious attempt at progress. Multiple admin's have been giving Tesla a horrific pass on collecting any meaningful data, and Tesla never intended to give out any of it. Any industry that does this is a joke in my eyes, especially with safety on the line.
In general it's assume that corruption and stupidity and all sorts of other factors will fuck things up, so you over engineer and plan around it best you can and still mandate lots of checks and balances.
And then Tesla's allowed to sell cars with "autopilot", beta test FSD on the roads, and basically shove all the data under a desk and basically nobody gave a fuck until musk himself started being an asshole. At no point do I feel that the NTHSA has put even an iota of the kind of pressure or rigor should be required for these things. If Tesla built bridges or planes they wouldn't have ever been allowed to.
Really disappointing to hear from /u/greentheonly that Tesla's improved its ability to encrypt and delete crash data remotely. As I said, we need independent black box data storage and management...
Really disappointing to hear from /u/greentheonly that Tesla's improved its ability to encrypt and delete crash data remotely. As I said, we need independent black box data storage and management if we're actually concerned about safety.
Excerpt from the article:
IANAL, but I have some experience with the plaintiff's side of product liability litigation and forensic engineering. This is an absolutely damning example of corporate malfeasance in evidence destruction, and it's not surprising that the jury found against Tesla to the tune of a $243 million verdict. That will almost certainly be reduced on appeal.
I remain surprised that the U.S. National Transportation and Highway Safety Administration hasn't insisted on black box rules (e.g. third party escrow for crash data and vehicle memory on all self-driving systems, if not government holding) for software-on-wheels.
If the state police hadn't maintained custody of the vehicle data recorders, no one would have had any idea about the autonomous driving systems' contribution to the crash in the article, thanks to Tesla's efforts in data destruction.
The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) kept secret how unsafe the Boeing 737 Max was after the first crash despite being given the true data on MCAS. It wouldn't surprise me if other American agencies are also complicit in hiding serious safety flaws in other American products and, in this case, they may already have this data and be sitting on it to protect the bottom-line.
Boeing was in a better position to enact regulatory capture of the FAA - there was little US competition in the product niche that the Boeing 700-series planes occupied.
Tesla is an upstart and it's easy to see that other established U.S. automakers might have something to say about Tesla's commanding lead in autonomous driving.
This doesn't at all invalidate your point, but "upstart" doesn't really describe Tesla anymore. They've been selling cars for the greater part of a decade now and their most popular models eclipse every other EV in terms of sales.
That is an interesting point. It is frustrating that it often feels like only giant corporations have any political power, but among those are competitors to Tesla that could potentially gain value by lobbying for regulations that will hurt Tesla far more than themselves. This seems like it would be especially easy right now due to the falling out between Musk and this administration and record of problems like the one that started this thread to point to. American businesses do love regulatory capture, so while I don't necessarily think it will happen it seems like it plausibily could.
It's the main reason I've always been against Tesla and felt that this whole thing was a dangerous marketing escapade not a serious attempt at progress. Multiple admin's have been giving Tesla a horrific pass on collecting any meaningful data, and Tesla never intended to give out any of it. Any industry that does this is a joke in my eyes, especially with safety on the line.
In general it's assume that corruption and stupidity and all sorts of other factors will fuck things up, so you over engineer and plan around it best you can and still mandate lots of checks and balances.
And then Tesla's allowed to sell cars with "autopilot", beta test FSD on the roads, and basically shove all the data under a desk and basically nobody gave a fuck until musk himself started being an asshole. At no point do I feel that the NTHSA has put even an iota of the kind of pressure or rigor should be required for these things. If Tesla built bridges or planes they wouldn't have ever been allowed to.
The hacker who found the data (greentheonly) discussed the situation on reddit.
Really disappointing to hear from /u/greentheonly that Tesla's improved its ability to encrypt and delete crash data remotely. As I said, we need independent black box data storage and management if we're actually concerned about safety.
Mirror: https://archive.is/8rWcO