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.
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.
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.
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.