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Tesla withheld data, lied, misdirected police to avoid blame in Autopilot crash
- duxup 1y agoI suppose it isn't but the sheer scale of effort seems like it should be criminal.
- throwanem 1y agoI would like to see how the decision was justified to implement automated deletion of the onboard snapshot.
- amelius 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampering_with_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampering_with_evidence
- _trampeltier 1y ago.. a person ..
- jeffbee 1y agoThere aren't enough details in the somewhat hyperbolic narrative format to really say, but if I were going to create a temporary archive of files on an embedded system for diagnostic upload, I would also delete it, because that's the nature of temporary files and nobody likes ENOSPACE. If their system had deleted the inputs of the archive that would seem nefarious, but this doesn't, at first scan.
- throwanem 1y ago"Their system" is a car, sold as a consumer product, which has just experienced a collision removing it indefinitely from normal operation. Reconsider your analysis.
- jeffbee 1y agoYes? But the article doesn't say that Tesla deleted the EDR, it says they uploaded the EDR file in an archive format, then deleted the uploaded entity. Which strikes me as totally normal.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoTotally normal for a completely different domain. Very abnormal for what's functionally the car's black box.
- jeffbee 1y agoNo, the car's "black box" is the EDR, the behavior of which is regulated by federal agencies. This article is discussing ephemeral telemetry which accessed the EDR.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoNo, the EDR forms part of the car's "black box" – just like the FDR forms part of an aeroplane's black box. Per the article, the erased* telemetry ("collision snapshot") contained quite a bit more data than just from the EDR. *: I can't work out from the article whether this file was erased, or just unlinked from the filesystem: they quote someone as saying the latter, but it looks like it was actually the former.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoWhat was deleted was the compiled file sent to Tesla, not all the bits of data that it came from. Nothing malicious in that, just code not leaving trash around.
- throwanem 1y agoWell, thank goodness for that. Wouldn't want to die in a car crash with an untidy filesystem, just like Mama always said.
- pnt12 1y agoThis is baffling. Those files are the most important information the car contains after an accident. Let's not be naive, or deceptive, about a malpractice from a multi billion company owned by a multi billionaire.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoThey did not erase the original data, only the compiled file that was sent. That's just proper coding, clean up your temporary files!
- danso 1y agoThe file was reportedly named "snapshot_collision_airbag-deployment.tar", which indicates that the developers are able to know that this particular event is a terminal one. Is it really necessary to be mindful of a few GB of storage space on a device that will likely never again to record data for its host vehicle?
- LorenPechtel 1y agoWhatever named the file knew it was a bad event, but that doesn't mean the routine to transmit an incident had a special case for this.
- atoav 1y agoJail the CEO.
- dotcoma 1y agoHow strange.
- gigatexal 1y agogiven these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMk28nV9nkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMk28nV9nkI and how connected Elon is to Trump ... I doubt anything will come of it.
- throwaway290 1y agoAfter their recent falling out though it might be the other way around no?
- dmix 1y agoThis article is about a civil suit where they got fined $300M dollars
- freejazz 1y agoHow do you go and correct someone to say that it was a civil suit and then call the judgment a fine???
- dmix 1y agoFunny I was going to fix that earlier but figured it was close enough to provide OP context. Being 100% right on the internet is not that big of a deal. Although it's true smugly nitpicking text in people's comments is not helpful behaviour.
- freejazz 1y agoI think it's a pretty meaningful distinction but perhaps I'm in the minority there. I certainly don't care to be 100% right on the internet about everything.
- ninetyninenine 1y agonormally a person would go to jail. But corporations just pay a fine. I think we really need to come up with punishments that are actual deterrents. Like any time a corporation ends up killing someone from negligence there needs to be an action that is equivalent and scaled appropriately. Send the corporation to jail. That means it cannot conduct business for the same amount of time that we would put a person in jail.
- ryandrake 1y agoIf "corporations are people" then there should be a way to incarcerate and/or execute criminal corporations. And we the people should do it roughly as regularly as we incarcerate/execute actual human criminals.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoCorporations don't actually exist, except on paper. Preserve the records, and you can un-execute them if need be. This suggests we should be executing corporations more readily than we execute humans.
- tengwar2 1y agoPossibly, but start with prosecuting humans (company staff and directors) as accessories to the crime.
- scottLobster 1y agoNo need for anything so drastic, just make the fines a sufficiently large percentage of corporate free cash flow. Make negligence unprofitable and the profit-optimizers will take care of the rest. Then 80 years later when people get too used to "trustworthy" corporationns we can deregulate everything and repeat the cycle
- mandevil 1y agoThe last time that a major corporation was found guilty for criminal behavior (Arthur Andersen in 2002 for Enron related stuff) the company closed immediately. This has led to problems in the audit industry, where was once the Big 8 audit firms has shrunk, due to mergers and AA dissolving, there basically are barely enough firms to independently audit each others books, and it's made the audit market much worse. The MCI Worldcom fraud, which broke shortly after Enron, might also have doomed AA (they were the auditor for both major frauds of 2002). MCI Worldcom filed for bankruptcy before it could be hit with criminal charges, and the SEC ended up operating MCI-W in the bankruptcy, because the fines were so large and are senior to all other debts, so they outmuscled all of the other creditors in the bankruptcy filings. Which was why they weren't hit with criminal charges- they already belonged to the Government. There hasn't been much stomach for criminal charges against a corporation ever since. The fact that the Supreme Court has spent the past few decades making white collar crimes much harder to prosecute (including with Arthur Andersen, where they unanimously reversed the conviction in 2005) is another major factor. The Supreme Court has always been terrible, and gets far more respect than it deserves.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760573
- aeturnum 1y agoI've seen people say that this reward seems very high for a single crash and I suspect that the behavior described here is a big part of that.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI am rather sick of the AI generated hero image, but this one made me laugh.
- breadwinner 1y agoIt was probably made using Musk's own Grok as other AIs disallow depicting real people.
- addandsubtract 1y agoI think it's wild that a legit article would use an image like that. Sure it's funny, but save it for social media, not a news source that's supposed to be based on facts.
- resource_waste 1y agoI probably wouldn't care much about Tesla and Elon, but he scammed his way to become a fortune 500 company which made SPY and my 401k autobuy Tesla. Buying SPY, my mistake. Being incentivized to put money in my 401k... That is a bit harder to solve.
- aeternum 1y agoIt's actually quite easy to solve, you can calculate how many shares of tesla you own via the index fund and buy an an equal quantity of TSLS.
- resource_waste 1y ago'Easy' Well, I didn't know about this. I didn't consider it. I also would then need to spend a non-tax deductible amount on this. And IIRC Tesla entered the Fortune 500 before 2022 when that TSLS started. Then I'd have to actually do the calculation, and continue doing the calculation as SPY/my 401k adjusted each month or so. 'Easy'
- elAhmo 1y agoAs long as there is no criminal liability for people doing this, nothing will change. This is pocket change for a company, rounding error, as Tesla's valuation has gone significantly since this happened in 2019, six years ago.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoThere is no company for which $329M is "pocket change". This is a huge fine, even for Tesla.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoI think OP's point is - the fine is not large enough to impact Tesla's stock price - which is all Tesla cares about. It also didn't really seem to impact Tesla's decision to keep pushing Full Self Driving and Robotaxi despite it having obvious severe flaws (because Tesla sees this rollout as something holding up its stock price).
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoTesla cares about Free Cash Flow. This fine negatively and materially impacts FCF. Tesla cares about this fine.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoThey obviously care about losing $300M. Like, if they have a chance, they are going to keep $300M. That is obvious. OP's point is - it is not having any impact on Tesla's reckless decisions. Stock price is #1 on the list of their concerns. FCF is somewhere much lower in the list.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago"in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long term it's a weighing machine" They definitely care about the FCF impact of this fine and what it says about future liability.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI get this may be off topic, but does anyone think these cheesy, bad AI-generated headline images help the article's point of view, or heck even make it more engaging? It just looks stupid to me in a way that makes me more likely to discount your post.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIt started with YouTube thumbnails and leaked from there. It just gets more clicks compared to a legitimate photo
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI can get it for some rando YouTube video. For an article that is supposed to at least smell like journalism, it looks so trashy.
- perihelions 1y agoJournalism? It's literally just a blog—a very successful car-influencer blog that's in the past earned 6-figure payments from Tesla itself[0], for their very successful shilling of Teslas. Journalism is a thing of its own; blogs aren't it. [0] https://www.thedrive.com/news/24025/electreks-editor-in-chief-publisher-both-scoring-250000-tesla-roadsters-for-free-by-gaming-referral-program https://www.thedrive.com/news/24025/electreks-editor-in-chie... ("Electrek’s Editor-in-Chief, Publisher Both Scoring $250,000 Tesla Roadsters for Free by Gaming Referral Program": "What happens to objective coverage when a free six-figure car is at play? Nothing good." (2018))
- akudha 1y agoI haven't done it, so I don't have any data to back it up. I suppose it works, at least short term, that is why so many websites, video creators, copywriters, email newsletter writers etc use it? Negative, cheesy, clickbait, rage inducing etc headlines do seem to get more clicks. There is a reason why politicians spend more time trash talking opponents than talking positively about themselves. Same goes with attack ads.
- lesuorac 1y agohttps://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59932667/benavides-v-tesla-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59932667/benavides-v-te...
- belter 1y ago"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." - Honoré de Balzac "Tesla awards boss Elon Musk $29bn in shares" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz71vn1v3n4o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz71vn1v3n4o
- sbassi 1y ago"...the investigator thought that Tesla was being collaborative with the investigation at the time..." So this is also a failure of the investigator.
- pm90 1y agoNo its not. Investigators will try to obtain data willingly unless they are made to believe that the party is not acting in good faith.
- goosejuice 1y agoThis seems pretty dumb of Tesla, as I find it rather moot to the conclusion of fault in the accident. The obstruction of justice is damning. Autopilot is cruise control. When you understand this, claiming that Tesla is partially at fault here does not match the existing expectations of other driver assistance tech. Just because Tesla has the capability of disabling it doesn't mean they have to. This all comes down to an interpretation of marketing speak. If you believe "autopilot" is misleading you'd agree with the jury here, if you don't you wouldn't. I'm no lawyer, and don't know the full scope of requirements for autopilot like features, but it seems that Tesla is subject to unfair treatment here given the amount of warnings you have to completely ignore and take no responsibility for. I've never seen such clear warnings on any other car with similar capabilities. I can't help but think there's maybe some politically driven bias here and I say that as a liberal. Happy to be convinced otherwise. I do drive a Tesla, so there's that.
- freejazz 1y ago> but it seems that Tesla is subject to unfair treatment here given the amount of warnings you have to completely ignore and take no responsibility for. Lol is this for real? No amount of warnings can waive away their gross negligence. Also, the warnings are clearly completely meaningless because they result in nothing changing if they are ignored. > Autopilot is cruise control You're pointing to "warnings" while simultaneously saying this? Seems a bit lacking in self awareness to think that a warning should muster the day, but calling cruise control "autopilot" is somehow irrelevant? > I can't help but think there's maybe some politically driven bias here Look only to yourself, Tesla driver.
- thebruce87m 1y ago> they result in nothing changing if they are ignored. That’s not true > Do I still need to pay attention while using Autopilot? > … Before enabling Autopilot, you must agree to “keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and to always “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Once engaged, Autopilot will also deliver an escalating series of visual and audio warnings, reminding you to place your hands on the wheel if insufficient torque is applied. If you repeatedly ignore these warnings, you will be locked out from using Autopilot during that trip. > If you repeatedly ignore the inattentive driver warnings, Autosteer will be disengaged for that trip. If you receive several ‘Forced Autopilot Disengagements’ (three times for vehicles without a cabin camera and five times for vehicles with a cabin camera), Autosteer and all features that use Autosteer will be temporarily removed for approximately one week. https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/support/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/support/autopilot
- declan_roberts 1y agoIt's difficult for me to tell in the article because how much the terms are used interchangeably, but it was it FSD or autosteer that was driving the car when it crashed? My autosteer will gladly drive through red lights, stop signs, etc. And the fact that we have telemetry at all is pretty amazing. Most car crashes there's zero telemetry. Tesla is the exception, even though they did the wrong thing here.
- eptcyka 1y agoAutopilot, not autosteer. Wording here is important.
- indoordin0saur 1y agoThis was in 2019 so I don't think FSD was a thing yet.
- steveBK123 1y agoThe longer the farce goes on, the more I think the laggers in the self driving car industry are more trying to wait out regulators than actually get good enough. That is - gamble GOP alignment leading to to regulatory capture such that the bar is lowered enough that they can declare the cars safe.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoDespite what you hear from certain media voices, there are effectively no performance-based regulatory barriers in the US. You can claim any autonomy level you want at any time and aside from the small number of states that have a real permit process that rises above a rubber stamp (literally just California), regulators are reactive to headlines of your system failing, not its actual performance. Even California's system is lax enough that you can drive a Tesla semi through it.
- redindian75 1y agoburied under all that sensationalism is this line... "The driver was responsible for the crash and he admitted as such..."
- rapind 1y agoI’m not knowledgeable of this incident, so let’s assume I accept your argument that it was the drivers fault (seems likely enough). Are you also arguing that Tesla didn’t withhold data, lie, and misdirect the police in this case, as the article claims? Seems to me that Tesla tried to look as guilty as possible here.
- MBCook 1y agoThe driver was found 2/3rds at fault, Tesla 1/3rd. I agree with you that doesn’t matter when it comes to covering up/lying about evidence. They could have been 0.5% at fault. Doesn’t mean that was ok.
- Ajedi32 1y agoThe fact that Tesla doesn't have a process for making crash data available to investigators is pretty indefensible IMO, given they're retaining that data for their own analysis. Would be one thing if they didn't save the data for privacy reasons, but if they have it, and there's a valid subpoena, they obviously need to hand it over. For context though, note that this crash occurred because the driver was speeding, using 2019 autopilot (not FSD) on a city street (where it wasn't designed to be used), bending down to pick up a phone he dropped on the floor, and had his foot on the gas overriding the automatic braking: https://electrek.co/2025/08/01/tesla-tsla-is-found-liable-in-fatal-autopilot-crash-has-to-pay-329-million/ https://electrek.co/2025/08/01/tesla-tsla-is-found-liable-in... The crash itself was certainly not Tesla's fault, so I'm not sure why they were stonewalling. I think there's a good chance this was just plain old incompetence, not malice.
- simion314 1y agoThe article claims that the software should have been geo fensed in that area but Tesla failed to do that, that the software should have trigger warnings of collisions but it did not do that. So there were things Tesla wanted to hide.
- Ajedi32 1y agoI don't necessarily disagree, but I personally find these "but you theoretically could have done even more to prevent this"-type arguments to be a little dubious in cases where the harm was caused primarily by operator negligence. I do like the idea of incentivizing companies to take all reasonable steps to protect people from shooting themselves in the foot, but what counts as "reasonable" is also pretty subjective, and liability for having a different opinion about what's "reasonable" seems to me to be a little capricious. For example, the system did have a mechanism for reacting to potential collisions. The vehicle operator overrode it by pushing the gas pedal. But the jury still thinks Tesla is still to blame because they didn't also program an obnoxious alarm to go off in that situation? I suppose that might have been helpful in this particular situation. But exactly how far should they legally have to go in order to not be liable for someone else's stupidity?
- rcpt 1y agoBullish for TSLA. Cruise had to shut down after less than this but, because Elon has political power over regulation now, a Tesla could drive right through a farmers market and they wouldn't have to pause operations even for an afternoon.
- nkohari 1y ago> Elon has political power over regulation now Does he still? I wouldn't be so sure.
- dbg31415 1y agoWhat do you call two lying executives in minimum security prison? A good start. So the solution to all of this is to lock up more executives who commit fraud or lie to the public. Recently (after a 10 year battle) two former Volkswagen executives just got prison time for the Dieselgate scandal. Wish it had come faster, but that's a good start. https://www.lbc.co.uk/crime/volkswagen-execs-jailed-fraud-decade-infamous-dieselgate-emissions-scandal/ https://www.lbc.co.uk/crime/volkswagen-execs-jailed-fraud-de...
- buyucu 1y agoOf course they did. This is how Tesla has been operating for a very long time.
- SoftTalker 1y ago[flagged]
- MarkusQ 1y agoThat plus the numerous spelling, grammatical and logic errors make it hard to take seriously. If there's actually a case to be made here, you would think we'd have a source that didn't read like there should be fleck of spittle with it.
- standardUser 1y agoThis is why Waymo will win. They've focused on transparency and building trust. They understand they are operating in the most physically dangerous space most people ever encounter in their day-to-day lives. That, and their technology actually works. Tesla is comparatively a bull in a china shop. Raise your hand if you would trust Tesla over Waymo to autonomously drive your young children for 1,000 miles around a busy metro. That's what I thought.
- ncr100 1y agoIf this 3-year-lie parade is what Tesla Inc does for killing ONE PERSON, imagine the lengths it will go to concealing MASS DEATHS it is in any part responsible. Tesla deserves regulating.
- pm90 1y ago> Tesla fans need to do a quick exercise in empathy right now. The way they are discussing this case, such as claiming the plaintiffs are just looking for a payout, is truly appalling. > You should put yourself in the family’s shoes. If your daughter died in a car crash, you’d want to know exactly what happened, identify all contributing factors, and try to eliminate them to give some meaning to this tragic loss and prevent it from happening to someone else. > It’s an entirely normal human reaction. And to make this happen in the US, you must go through the courts. This (especially the very last point) is crucial. Whenever there is any kind of error or mistake by a big corporation, more often than not, its immediately covered up, nothing is admitted publicly. But when a lawsuit is involved, the discovery process will lead to the facts being uncovered, including what the company knows. I am glad that they were able to uncover this. Someone I know lived in an apartment complex that was made uninhabitable due to an obvious fault on the owner, but they didn't get a straight answer about what happened until they sued the owner and got the details in discovery, a couple of years after the incident. This is the only way to get to the facts.
- thephyber 1y agoOne of the few reasons I have _never_ entertained the possibility of buying a Tesla: despite collecting enough data to know what happened in almost every crash, the company will withhold the data if Tesla is at fault, but is more than happy to quickly publish selective data to support a PR assassination of a driver who is at fault. There are obviously other reasons, but I would much rather buy a car from a company that either doesn’t collect my data or doesn’t feel the need to bury me in the media if I screw up.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThat's highly illegal. I don't understand why no one was criminally charged.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThere are a painful number of typos in this article; whose content is otherwise good.
- fourg 1y agoanyone with a Tesla using this or something similar these days? curious if it would have been helpful in this case. https://github.com/marcone/teslausb https://github.com/marcone/teslausb
- TheAlchemist 1y agoIt's really good that these stories start to hit the headlines - Tesla was doint it for ages. Only recently they start to feel the heat and settled some cases. This should criminal behaviour. Another interesting thing is that this post does not appear on HN front page. Surely it should be relevant here that one of the top AI / Robotics / Tech, whatever you name it, company in the world is doing this kind of stuff in the open. But that may get people curious to actually look at what and how they are doing things and realize it's all smokes and mirrors and maybe there is much more shady business going on there. I just can't wait when this house of cards collapse.
- danso 1y agoApologies if this has been discussed in one of the many subthreads, but is there a reasonable explanation for the finding that the crashed Tesla "deleted its local copy" of the crash data? > Within ~3 minutes of the crash, the Model S packaged sensor video, CAN‑bus, EDR, and other streams into a single “snapshot_collision_airbag-deployment.tar” file and pushed it to Tesla’s server, then deleted its local copy. Putting aside the legal implications wrt evidence, etc — what is the ostensible justification for this functionality? To a layperson, it's as bizarre as designing a plane's black box to go ahead and delete data if it somehow makes a successful upload to the FAA cloud server. Why add complexity that reduces redundancy in this case?
- adinisom 1y agoTwo that come to mind: 1) Embedded systems typically do not allow data to grow without bound. If they were going to keep debugging data, they'd have to limit it to the last N instances or so. In this case N=0. It seems like the goal here was to send troubleshooting data, not keep it around. 2) Persisting the data may expose the driver to additional risks. Beyond the immediate risks, someone could grab the module from the junkyard and extract the data. I can appreciate devices that take steps to prevent sensitive data from falling into the hand of third parties.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoIt would be trivial to set it up to only delete old instances when free space goes below a threshold. If the data can expose the driver to additional risks, then the driver can be exposed by someone stealing the vehicle and harvesting that data. Again, that can be trivially protected against using encryption which would also protect in the instance that communication was disrupted so that the tar isn't uploaded/deleted.
- mikewarot 1y agoPerhaps it's time for Tesla to face Judicial Dissolution[1], aka the Corporate Death Penalty. It would send a clear message to Musk, and those like him responsible for these type of unacceptable acts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution
- mbar84 1y agoWould be good for Tesla's reputation if they would upload/mirror the crash data to a neutral third party. Then the police and plaintiff could get it from there without any allegations of withholding data.