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.
danc4498@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Holy fucking shit. What is the purpose of deleting the data on the vehicle other than to sabotage the owner of the vehicle?
lividweasel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Eheran@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If they can transmit it, it is not a lot. It is that simple.
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
That’s not “benefit of the doubt”, that’s “playing devil’s advocate”. They probably used something like this.
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Smells like intentional destruction of evidence.
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Criminal destruction of evidence.
Criminal withholding of evidence.
Shanedino@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Forensic analysis managed to retrieve this data, so it must have been stored in non-volatile memory.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
danc4498@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
alvyn@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
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”.
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Information to be used against you and never for you.