this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash (electrek.co)
submitted 2 days ago by DrunkEngineer@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 211 points 2 days ago (33 children)

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?

[–] Shanedino@lemmy.world -2 points 1 day ago (19 children)

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 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Forensic analysis managed to retrieve this data, so it must have been stored in non-volatile memory.

[–] kjetil@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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

[–] patatahooligan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

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.

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