Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week.
The automaker was undeniably covering up for Autopilot.
Last week, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a wrongful death involving a crash on Autopilot. We now have access to the trial transcripts, which confirm that Tesla was extremely misleading in its attempt to place all the blame on the driver.
The company went as far as to actively withhold critical evidence that explained Autopilot’s performance around the crash. Within about three minutes of the crash, the Model S uploaded a “collision snapshot”—video, CAN‑bus streams, EDR data, etc.—to Tesla’s servers, the “Mothership”, and received an acknowledgement. The vehicle then deleted its local copy, resulting in Tesla being the only entity having access.
What ensued were years of battle to get Tesla to acknowledge that this collision snapshot exists and is relevant to the case.
The police repeatedly attempted to obtain the data from the collision snapshot, but Tesla led the authorities and the plaintiffs on a lengthy journey of deception and misdirection that spanned years.
Within about three minutes of the crash, the Model S uploaded a “collision snapshot”—video, CAN‑bus streams, EDR data, etc.—to Tesla’s servers, the “Mothership”, and received an acknowledgement. The vehicle then deleted its local copy, resulting in Tesla being the only entity having access.
Holy fucking shit. What is the purpose of deleting the data on the vehicle other than to sabotage the owner of the vehicle?
That jumped out at me too. Giving the benefit of the doubt, it could be that this “snapshot” includes a very large amount of data that could be problematic if stored locally for longer. In reality, they probably do it this way for exactly this type of situation, so they can retain full control of the potentially-damning data.
If they can transmit it, it is not a lot. It is that simple.
Nearly all of the vehicles have 4G/5G connectivity via AT&T. This isn’t a dial up connection. They can transmit whatever the fuck they want.
Still, if it’s small enough to transmit via any wireless connection they can easily keep the local copy.
Mate, a 1 TB micro SD costs less than 100 $. How much does a high bandwidth high/no data limit 5G connection cost and how long would that need to actually transmit that much?
What sensor data is there even supposed to be? Even at 1 millisecond resolution we are talking about megabytes.
Bullshit. It was saved locally. It can stay saved locally but be marked for deletion if storage gets tight. This is a solved computer science problem.
There is zero reason to delete it immediate except to cover their asses.
If I was on the jury I’d be pushing for maximum monetary penalty.
Treble damages
Agreed, if there was concern about the data falling into the wrong hands then there’s many different ways to secure the data (encryption w/ a secure enclave, masking, hardening) besides just deleting it. Tesla’s strategy here totally foregoes any typical data retention lifecycle like you mention, which is usually to delete old data that has little to no benefit besides just adding additional risk (e.g. trips older than 1 year or if there’s no space left). Plus you have to take into account the additional consequences you take on by deleting the data locally such as not being in compliance with regulations, and potentially risking sanctions or heavy fines.
That’s not “benefit of the doubt”, that’s “playing devil’s advocate”. They probably used something like this.
Smells like intentional destruction of evidence.
Criminal destruction of evidence.
Criminal withholding of evidence.
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The only thing making this nazi company its market value and all the hype is promis of self driving. The autopilot technology is the main value. If there will be proof of it is wrong, Tesla gonna loose the investors. Simply as that, fucking nazi Musk cannot allow proof that his shitty car killed peoples because of the autopilot. I recommend to search for podcast and reporting by The Guardian on this theme. I’m really looking forward to read the book Tesla files. It’s from the journalist who was contacted by Tesla whistleblower. There are thousands cases when the autopilot started to behave just “little crazy”.
Information to be used against you and never for you.
It is possible that the data is just never saved in non-volatile memory meaning that once power is lost that the values are also lost. In which case its not really deleting the information but rather just that information is just never intentionally saved.
P.S. I am not a tesla fan boy just wanted to give this tiny insight.
Forensic analysis managed to retrieve this data, so it must have been stored in non-volatile memory.
Didnt the article say they retrieved the filename and hash, thus proving the existence of the crash diagnostic snapshot. After which Tesla handed over their copy?
Or did the forensics retrieve the actual data?
Edit: Given the importance of this type of data, not saving it to non-voletile memory is negligent at best. Even if it required a huge amount of space, they could delete unimportant files like the Spotify cache or apps or whatever
The article kind of fumbles the wording and creates confusion. There are, however, some passages that indicate to me that the actual data was recovered. All of the following are taking about the NAND flash memory.
The engineers quickly found that all the data was there despite Tesla’s previous claims.
…
Now, the plaintiffs had access to everything.
…
Moore was astonished by all the data found through cloning the Autopilot ECU:
“For an engineer like me, the data out of those computers was a treasure‑trove of how this crash happened.”
…
On top of all the data being so much more helpful, Moore found unallocated space and metadata for snapshot_collision_airbag‑deployment.tar’, including its SHA‑1 checksum and the exact server path.
It seems that maybe the .tar file itself was not recovered, but all the data about the crash was still there.
This explanation is completely fabricated, based on nothing, and nonsense.
It is obviously critical data that nobody halfway competent would write to ram. Also video data is very large and makes no sense to store in ram.
Furthermore the article says it was deleted and they later recovered it which would not have been possible with RAM
Basically why are you pushing this drivel.
If the data is temporarily stored until it is transmitted and then is not considered to be needed anymore I see no reason as to why that would need to be stored locally forever.
Because it may not be possible to transmit depending on location. Also non violtile storage is cheap and fast and ram is normally limited
On embedded controllers you are usually heavily limited with nonvolatile memory.
Not sure why you think this, it’s generally trivial to add non-volatile storage to microcontrollers, and much more complicated to add external RAM.
Perhaps most importantly although we know it was not so lost because we read the article or at least the summary if it had been it would have been a deliberate design decision to have it be so.
Your explanation doesn’t wash in reality but it also doesn’t wash even in theory.
You’re also making assumptions in that the volatile memory lost power and thus must have been cleared at some point. I dont think there is a right or a wrong based on the knowledge i have I just am throwing out a random guess.
The article says Tesla deletes it and was forced to produce it. Seems pretty obvious that your theory is wrong
Yeah, this is a good point. Also, another comment said it’s possible the data snapshot is very large, so it’s not intended to be stored locally.
Either way, if you are sending data about my car to a server, it better be easy for me to get this data if needed.
Don’t these keep a video record of every time a squirrel gets too close to the parked car?
Another m.2 under the dash isn’t going to kill the electric vehicles battery, this isn’t an excuse.
Don’t these keep a video record
those are saved on external drives. That being said, they could also have it set to save something like this to the external storage if it was too large for the internal memory as well.
Videos aren’t saved without the external drive.
Hell, it could be that this is private information about the driver and the car’s probably gonna end up in a Copart auction after insurance is done with it, so in a way they’re protecting PII.
Before anyone’s gonna accuse me of Tesla fanboyism (I do make a lot of devil’s advocate style comments), I’ve driven exactly one Tesla in my life, decided it’s a piece of shit with a great powertrain and OK infotainment but absolutely lacking UX for drivers, and a ridiculously plain interior. I will never buy a Tesla unless it’s a used Tesla S or X with a newish battery for 10k because at that price it’d just be the cheapest way to get a luxury EV lol
I doubt they’re doing a full OS wipe when an accident occurs. So PII data would still be on there.
Just stuff you voluntarily save if the crash data is in RAM only. RAM gets autowiped.
What PII is there? It’s a fucking dash cam video, it’s not my blood results from my annual checkup.
Full home address via recordings of where you live would be PII, or with the “home address” option set for automations.
@DrunkEngineer A normal company fires its CEO and cleans house after something like that. Instead Tesla just offered him a big new compensation package to encourage him to stay and keep destroying their reputation and any shred of morality they may claim to have.
A particular insurance company replaced a mysteriously dead executive with another who doubled down on premeditated murder.
Same walking route?
You would think that’s a crime
Laws only apply to poor people
Poor people get looked down upon, including by poor people
Crabs in a bucket?
Folks. Publicly traded companies will ALWAYS compare the expected value of breaking the law with compliance.
Say it costs $100 million to follow the law. Breaking it comes with a $300 million fine, but only a 20% chance of getting caught.
They compare a 100% chance of paying $100 million to a 20% chance of paying $300 million.
Average cost of following the law: $100 million
Average cost of breaking it: $60 million
If we’re gonna do capitalism (which I would rather we not, for the record!), we have to make that expected value calculation break in favor of following regulations. If it is cheaper to break the law than to follow it, you’re not just losing money by complying: you’re giving ground to your competition. Fines need to be massive. Infractions need to get caught and punished. Executives need to be held personally accountable. Corporations need to be dissolved. Fines cannot be just the cost of doing business.
Do people need to (re)watch Fight Club?
Narrator:
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside.
Now, should we initiate a recall?
Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
It’s been like 25 years.
Did people like… genuienly not know this, forget about it?
The conditioning of people to think it must be monetary fines is strong I guess. Imo it shouldn’t be a fine for intentionally breaking laws, especially when putting lives in danger. It should be jail time for the executives. Make the calculation disappear altogether.
Do a China and just execute them.
Uhh there’s still death penalty in USA. And if corporations are legally people…
If only…
One can dream.
Dissolution of corporations was once the law of the land in uncle Sam’s backyard.
Will happen just not in the way we want it.
A capitalist would say ‘The market will correct this.’
Well the market corrected UHC’s ceo
I’d raise you in that. Companies are people now. If companies break laws, they should be held accountable personally. Even Club Fed would be misery for 14 years on a murder rap.
I’d argue the entire C-suite should be legally responsible for anything the company does.
The CEO in particular IMO, unless it’s financial (CFO) or tech (CTO, CIO).
However, it’s already the CEO’s job to take the heat in public so the board doesn’t have to.
Instead, hold everyone who holds a stake responsible, down to everyone with a 401k with 3 shares in the company for major violations.
See how quickly the shareholders vote to have better transparency.
While an attractive pitch, remember that what’s going to fuck over the working class are the laws intended to attack the assholes at the top. Which group do you think will have the means to defend themselves in court, has the power to make legislative moves, and would benefit from having another tool to fuck their slaves with?
And those are actions are what really needs to be curtailed.
Personally I think all lawyer fees should be paid by an entirely new (corporate) tax unless you are a small business with revenue less than a reasonable amount (absolutely not more than 100000 per employee and probably not even that much)
Class action criminal suits then.
Prosecute everyone who owns even a single share in the company and if the working class guy goes to jail, so does the wealthy guy, no exceptions. But by share of ownership so whoever owns most, gets the most jailtime.
Offshore shareholders can just get all their assets in the country seized.
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Isn’t this how murderers act? This sounds like they “accidentally” (collateral damage) killed people and then are trying to cover it up.
I swear I’m not a tesla fan boy but I’m going to sit here and pull baseless excuses out of my ass for two paragraphs in order to defend this terrible company headed by a literal nazi.
— this entire fucking comment section
Just following Dear Leader’s example.
It the American WayTM
Scumbags
Is this the one where the car crashes after Autopilot turns off? Where Tesla tries to claim that the driver floored it after it turned off?
No, in this case autopilot never disengaged (but according to the article, it should have issued the warning and disengaged earlier)
I think it was the one where the driver was looking for his phone with his foot on the pedal and claims Autopilot should’ve overridden his manual override of Autopilot.
Musk = POS Nazi.
I really wish Roosevelt was around to smash these companies into pieces for this shit.
a company doing unethical immoral things, purgery and lying to officials? thats been done a billion times already. Elon is no different then any other scum bag who runs the world.
