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Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it

671 points by clcaev 1y ago

ath3nd 1y ago
Of course they will say they don't have the key data. Do we expect them to admit they were outright lying and wrong considering their leader is a pill popping Nazi salute making workaholic known to abuse his workers?
- rwmj 1y ago
  Lying to a court is usually pretty serious. Any sensible legal department will tell you never to do that, whatever your CEO says.
  - emsign 1y ago
    Unless you paid off the president they assume.
    - gruez 1y ago
      Did they have a falling out a few months ago?
  - psychoslave 1y ago
    You mean, the other allegations on this same person would not be judged something serious and could even be recommended?
  - lawn 1y ago
    Usually. But today you just have a private dinner with the president and he'll wave it away.
  - buyucu 1y ago
    Not if your boss is super-rich.
metaphor 1y ago
https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp
voidUpdate 1y ago
I'm still convinced that it being called "full self driving" is misleading marketing and really needs to stop, since it isn't according to Tesla
- acdha 1y ago
  Why do you think Musk put so much money into helping Trump win? Tesla was under multiple investigations for safety and unkept promises, and he knew that he would not have leverage to halt those under a Harris administration.
  - thowaway52729 1y ago
    If that was his goal he would have minded his own business after the election, instead of spouting invective posts against Trump on X.
    - Maken 1y ago
      That was after Musk realized he had alienated his entire consumer base.
      - thowaway52729 1y ago
        And he wants to bring them back by alienating Trump while doubling down on his rhetoric?
        delfinom 1y ago
        He has an ego and narcissism but he isn't dumb. He sees the problems but also cant admit hes wrong or anything.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
        > but he isn't dumb. Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked. “Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk. “I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.” The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist. “Fuck you!” Musk growled. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...
metaphor 1y ago
> Immediately after the wreck at 9:14 p.m. on April 25, 2019, the crucial data detailing how it unfolded was automatically uploaded to the company’s servers and stored in a vast central database, according to court documents. Tesla’s headquarters soon sent an automated message back to the car confirming that it had received the collision snapshot. > Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony. Wow...just wow.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I am trying to imagine a scenario under which that is defensible and does not raise various questions including compliance, legal, retention. Not to mention, who were the people who put that code into production knowing it would do that. edit: My point is that it was not one lone actor, who would have made that change.
  - colejohnson66 1y ago
    Assuming no malice, I'd guess it's for space saving on the car's internal memory. If the data was uploaded off of the car, there’s no point keeping it in the car.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      Sounds like a pretty standard telemetry upload. You transmit it, keep your copy until you get acknowledgement that it was received so you can retry if it went wrong, then delete it when it succeeds. It’s just worded to make this sound sketchy. I bet ten bucks “unlinked” just refers to the standard POSIX call for deleting a file.
      - tobias3 1y ago
        Sketchy is that then someone takes “affirmative action to delete” the data on the server as well. Also this is not like some process crash dump where the computer keeps running after one process crashed. This would be like an plane black box uploading its data to the manufacturer, then deleting itself after a plane crash.
estearum 1y ago
Surely this is the behavior of a company that's confident in the safety of its products!
fabian2k 1y ago
Do I understand it correctly? Crash data gets automatically transmitted to Tesla, and after it was transmitted is immediately marked for deletion? If that is actually designed like this, the only reason I could see for it would be so that Tesla has sole access to the data and can decide whether to use it or not. Which really should not work in court, but it seems it has so far. And of course I'd expect an audit trail for the deletion of crash data on Tesla servers. But who knows whether there actually isn't one, or nobody looked into it at all.
- Someone 1y ago
  Another reason is if there’s other kinds of data that gets uploaded to Tesla, and the code for uploading crash data reuses that code. For the first kind of data, deleting the data from the car the moment there’s confirmation that it now is stored at Tesla can make perfect sense as a mechanism to prevent the car to run out of storage space. Of course, if the car crashed, deleting the data isn’t the optimal, but that it gets deleted may not be malice.
  - fabian2k 1y ago
    Deleting after a certain time makes sense, certainly. Deleting immediately seems dubious to me. Though the descriptions in the article are vague enough that we might be missing some big aspects. But in the end we wouldn't be discussing this at all if Tesla had simply handed over the data from their servers. If they can't find it, it isn't actually there or they deliberately removed it this affects how I view this process. Two copies are better than one. If you immediately erase the data, you better be sure the transmitted data is safe and secure. And obviously it wasn't.
  - cube00 1y ago
    Data retention is legal's bread and butter. There's no chance such a decision is accidently made by reusing code. Anytime data is recorded legal is immediately asking about retention so they don't end up empty handed in front of a judge. Every byte that car records and how it is managed will be documented in excruciating detail by legal.
chiffre01 1y ago
The description of the guy finding the data while at a Starbucks doesn't do justice to his setup shown in the photo. My dude has a seriously chaotic and awesome setup there.
- jalk 1y ago
  I imagine, he dumped the car data onto his laptop, so that he could work on the problem in a more cozy place, than his messy bitcave
clipclopflop 1y ago
Years back I bought a model3 infotainment unit on eBay to hack on - it’s absolutely insane at the amount of data contained on them. After gaining access to the system I was able to get the VIN of the car and find the salvage auction from the car it came out of - it had been wrecked. I then was able to get all the location data that gets logged, showing a glimpse of the previous owners life (house, work, stores they went to, etc) as well as the final resting place of the car. The last gps locations logged were at the end of a “T” intersection in North Carolina - google street view gave a nice look at the trees the car most likely hit :>
- foobarian 1y ago
  Neat! What's the hardware like, a Linux-ish computer with SD cards? Or SSD? Which filesystem?
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    I suspect it's Windows, actually, and I'm pretty sure the UI is some form of C#. They tried to recruit me for the UI. If I lived closer, I would have jumped on it. Not only was I bit of a Tesla fanboy at the time, I used to work across the street from their office and really liked that area. (Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto.)
    - flutas 1y ago
      https://github.com/teslamotors/linux https://github.com/teslamotors/linux
    - dagmx 1y ago
      It’s Linux and the UI is Qt
    - iamjake648 1y ago
      If this were true, Tesla wouldn't have the only use able car infotainment system in the industry.
  - clipclopflop 1y ago
firesteelrain 1y ago
If Tesla can’t ensure safeguarding of this information, it’s a feature that will get them in big trouble.
pu_pe 1y ago
Volkswagen was caught cheating on its emission data and the CEO got fired, then prosecuted. Why shouldn't that be the case here?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  You’d need a coalition of Democratic attorneys general to bring a case in the mould of Big Tobacco.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    We'd need a third party if you'd actually want to fight american corporations. Unless you intended "small d" democratic
    - dagmx 1y ago
      Good news, the CEO of this American corporation is making a third party… (the monkey paw curls)
      - MangoToupe 1y ago
        A third party... that sounds exactly like the other two. Where is the anti-capitalism party? The anti-war party? The anti-corruption party? Aren't political parties supposed to represent DIFFERENT interests? Instead we're forced to choose between a party hates immigrants and a party that hates immigrants slightly more And like you can criticize republicans, but they actually invested in intel. Wrong company, but a step in the right direction.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > anti-capitalism party? The anti-war party? The anti-corruption party? The first two aren’t as popular as you think. The last is a constant source of political capital.
  - croes 1y ago
ddtaylor 1y ago
[flagged]
- lexicality 1y ago
  The hacker is named and you can see his work in the page. Read TFA
  - claar 1y ago
    It's paywalled.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
      https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp
    - ddtaylor 1y ago
      The article is paywalled, but it also only calls the person "the hacker" and then says this: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case. So, we have information that we cannot prove being given by a person who won't testify in court? How is this proper chain of evidence, etc.?
  - ddtaylor 1y ago
    From the article: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case.
- SilverBirch 1y ago
  Tesla said the data recorded during the crash had been lost or deleted. The hacker produced the data. The data was used in court. The verification is the data. What's your suggestion? That they fabricated the data recovered from the car?
  - ddtaylor 1y ago
    I'm not accusing anyone of fabricating anything. I'm saying we do not have any way to verify the details. Where is the court document? Isn't this a forensics expert that testified in court? Why aren't they named? Wouldn't most forensics "hackers" be elated to be quoted? From the article: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case. It seems like a strange grey zone to have a hacker that uncovers all the information but will not testify in court, etc. I don't see how this wouldn't introduce chain of custody problems, etc. for the evidence which is why he would ultimately be testifying. Perplexing. EDIT - Meh, whatever. If you guys want to read articles that have zero proof and believe whatever they say because some anonymous hacker is quoted, etc. go for it. I don't get paid to educate anyone here.
05 1y ago
Don't worry, once Tesla figures out secure boot nobody will be able to call their bluff and they'll be free to 'lose' crash data with the same impunity the police loses their bodycam footage.
- ubunthree 1y ago
  This should be modded up higher. Exactly. The only way hackers found this is because they weren’t using secure boot or encrypted images. Every embedded developer knows about MCUboot. Except managers don’t want the overhead because it is complicated. Once embedded devs get the ok all embedded firmware will basically be like a Signal chat with only the manufacturer having the keys. Heck even PSA compliant hardware MUST be resistant to multibit glitch attacks. Bye bye hackers.
OutOfHere 1y ago
With everything that is wrong with Tesla, I'll be the first to say that all Tesla cars need to be taken off of the roads, at least until all of their auto-driving features have been fully removed.
gmd63 1y ago
None of this should be surprising to anyone who has given an ounce of effort to examining Elon's character. Lies about capabilities, timelines, even things as frivolous as being rank one in a video game. He bought Twitter to scale his deception.
h1fra 1y ago
The video is staggering, going super fast before an intersection, with no visibility, a blinking signal, and clear stop sign in sight. I hope FSD got better
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  not sure if you are saying otherwise but for those who might get confused this crash was with “Autopilot” not FSD, although both are definitely problematic
  - phkahler 1y ago
    >> not sure if you are saying otherwise but for those who might get confused this crash was with “Autopilot” not FSD And the distinction is what? I'm not serious of course. There are huge swaths of the public whose eyes would glaze over if you tried to explain it, and that's my point.
    - whimsicalism 1y ago
      i think the public can generally grasp the difference between lane assist and a waymo/AV but the naming is bad agreed
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        Tesla's official, wildly misleading position is that FSD is a driver assist system that should be treated no different than autopilot, not an autonomous system like Waymo. They've stated it in court, in regulatory filings, and if you open the owner's manual you'll find a bolded statement that FSD doesn't make the vehicle autonomous. Everything else that you might be reasonably misled by? Puffery and the official position is that you really should have known better.
        Sophira 1y ago
        I've seen videos of people literally using the Tesla mobile app to 'call' their FSD-enabled car to them. Given that that they coded this functionality and expose it in their app, I really don't see how Tesla can be let off by making the statement that you must officially be in front of the wheel all of the time.
aurizon 1y ago
Can you imagine air craft makers avoid this sort of black box autodelete! A red handed catch!
Noumenon72 1y ago
They should be saving every crash as a unit test to ensure it never happens again.
- inetknght 1y ago
  More than a unit test -- a whole system test. But, as a software engineer with experience in robotics and drones with a focus on software safety, yes I 100% agree. The unfortunate thing is that the state of the industry (or, my experience in it) currently is not set up to be able to do that cheaply nor at scale. Imagine you have tens of thousands of various unique problem scenarios to run through, and some might take several minutes of simulation to run the test. Even if your release cadence is slow, but especially if you have continuous deployment with dozens of micro-releases every day: how exactly do you cheaply scale such that simulation testing doesn't become a massive bottleneck?
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
  They should be bending over backwards to ensure they ALWAYS present the crash data even when it inconveniences them. Take the lawsuit "L" but boost public trust. It's worth noting that since this 2019 case I've not seen any legal cases where Tesla did not provide crash data. I think there is a reasonable chance it was honestly mishandled. When considering which parts of the software impact the driving experience, logs are way down the list. They should do better though, and if they intentionally misled anyone they should be punished. For any company to be significantly liable for a lane-keep crash, the behavior would have to be pretty egregious, IMO. All sorts of bad things can happen with most driving enhancements on any car, with common features such as overdrive, cruise control, or powerful engines, or even with non-features like manual transmissions. The liability for all of this should fall on the shoulders of the driver, most of the time, or we'd never get any cars on the road.
throw7 1y ago
After reading the article, I am never buying a Tesla. Props to greenthehacker. may you sip Starbuck's venti-size hot chocolates for many years to come.
- lexicality 1y ago
  Were you considering buying one before today? I'm curious as to what's different about this autopilot death compared to all the other autopilot deaths that have happened previously. Personally for me it was when the guy in Florida got decapitated when his car drove under a semitruck that made me never want to get in one again.
  - sneak 1y ago
    Autopilot is opt-in. You can drive it like any other car and never use autopilot.
    - lexicality 1y ago
      This is very true, but if you had to choose between two microwaves, one of which had a button that occasionally killed people and one which did not, which would you choose? Personally I would feel better buying a microwave that doesn't have the option to decapitate me, even if I would never press it.
      - whimsicalism 1y ago
        all cars have a button that occasionally kills people, it’s called the accelerator pedal
        lexicality 1y ago
        I think you know that's a false equivalence, both because every control in a car has the possibility of killing you and also because every car has an accelerator pedal and I'm talking about an extra button.
IlikeKitties 1y ago
So, will tesla get nuked from orbit for what is obviously a serious, intentional and systemic discovery violation or is this just ok because it's a big corp?
breadwinner 1y ago
> In the annotated video played for the jury, the vehicle detects a vehicle about 170 feet away. A subsequent frame shows it detecting a pedestrian about 116 feet away. As McGee hurtles closer and closer, the video shows the Tesla planning a path through Angulo’s truck, right where he and his girlfriend were standing behind signs and reflectors highlighting the end of the road. So the Tesla detected the vehicle and the pedestrian, and then plans a path through them? Wow! How bad is this software?
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  AI is so unlike anything weve ever seen and its going to revolutionise the world and its literally gna be skynet except it pathfinds like a counterstrike bot just ignore that bit
  - xgulfie 1y ago
    Just 2 more years bro just 2 more years and we'll have self driving cars working trust me bro
    - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
      https://waymo.com/rides/san-francisco/ https://waymo.com/rides/san-francisco/ You can take a Waymo any time of day in SF and they provide 1000s of successful rides daily
      - skeezyboy 1y ago
        And theyve had to spend how many manhours engineering around shit like the above?
        wuteva 1y ago
        Your point being?
        overfeed 1y ago
conradev 1y ago
Tesla recanted its employee’s testimony “after discovering evidence inconsistent with his stated recollection of events,” it said. That’s a fancy way to say that he lied
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  That is my big question in this. What happens to the specific employees who provably lied? That sounds like a big no-no, but I wonder in our twisted system if they get some kind of protection as acting on behalf of the company.
fblp 1y ago
No paywall link https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp
childintime 1y ago
I'd like to hear the law say that self-driving cars should collect data (video, sensor inputs, actuator outputs), and that it is the property of the law when an accident happens. No exceptions. The real question is how the law is written, for it should leave no doubt about what Tesla, or any other, is required to do. Probably all cars should have a black box, as both modern electronics and humans can do weird stuff.
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  good luck passing such a law in the US
- coolspot 1y ago
  That’s the case in California for autonomous vehicles (like Waymo). Tesla FSD is officially a driver’s assistance, not fully autonomous vehicle.
outside1234 1y ago
This will continue until people go to prison
de6u99er 1y ago
So first the data wasn't there, and suddenly it is there. I think the only way to prevent tis in the future is to litigate against those individuals who knowingly lie for a company.
- alphawhisky 1y ago
  Litigate the company, not the individual. The hiding of the data was almost certainly a result of company ethos and most likely involved multiple levels of people. The maintenance tech was probably the lowest paid of everyone involved.
declan_roberts 1y ago
Everyone is mad at Tesla but they're literally the only company collecting this kind of crash metadata. Other car manufacturers would never get in trouble for this because it's not even possible for them to do it in the first place!
- fred_is_fred 1y ago
  Wrong. Almost all modern cars track location and tons of other data. Ford even has a screen that pops-up saying basically "hey you're opting into this FYI".
  - declan_roberts 1y ago
    You think other cars are recording whether they detected a person and the approximate location of the person to the car?
    - inetknght 1y ago
      I certainly think that. Because, as a software engineer in robotics and drones, that's exactly what I would do. Using logs to recreate the scenario, especially for regression testing, is standard process for competent software engineers.
- jeremyjh 1y ago
  Everyone is mad because they killed people and lied about it.
- jdiff 1y ago
  People aren't mad that they collect the data, everyone does that, but that they immediately deleted it, then lied about it ever happening, in a matter of life and death. I would deeply encourage you to re-assess whatever led you to make this comment, because you have fallen wildly off the mark here. Corporations are not your friend.
LightBug1 1y ago
Huge props to the hacker (@greentheonly) ... considering the cutbacks in journalism, perhaps we're entering a world where some of the most important investigative journalism will be done by hackers. Unpaid, unrewarded excellence.
skeezyboy 1y ago
the dirtiest of doggery
rcpt 1y ago
Cruise was shut down for less than this. TSLA won't even have a down day. Corruption pays
- Fricken 1y ago
  GM execs shut Cruise down. I suspect they were just looking for an excuse.
buyucu 1y ago
Another day, another example of Tesla doing shady things.
sershe 1y ago
"AI drivers" glitch/fail differently than human drivers, and in ways that to humans look bizarre and easily preventable. Human driver failures (like being tired, drunk, very upset, or being on your phone, distracted by passengers, etc), to humans, look understandable, but from an AI perspective they look bizarre and easily preventable. In theory, what we should care about is which ones cause more deaths or accidents. The fact that AI accidents seem worse based on naive intuition shouldn't matter. However, humans serve on juries so here we go... Would there be a 200 million dollar judgement against someone who tried to get a can of pop from the back seat, ran over a pedestrian and then tried to lie about e.g. whether the light was red?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"A shareholder lawsuit in Texas filed this month alleges Tesla defrauded investors with its promotion of autonomous driving technology." https://ia600903.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172857934/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172857934.1.0.pdf https://ia600903.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.txwd.11...

671 points by clcaev 1y ago

Of course they will say they don't have the key data. Do we expect them to admit they were outright lying and wrong considering their leader is a pill popping Nazi salute making workaholic known to abuse his workers?

rwmj 1y ago
Lying to a court is usually pretty serious. Any sensible legal department will tell you never to do that, whatever your CEO says.
- emsign 1y ago
  Unless you paid off the president they assume.
  - gruez 1y ago
    Did they have a falling out a few months ago?
- psychoslave 1y ago
  You mean, the other allegations on this same person would not be judged something serious and could even be recommended?
- lawn 1y ago
  Usually. But today you just have a private dinner with the president and he'll wave it away.
- buyucu 1y ago
  Not if your boss is super-rich.

metaphor 1y ago

https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp

voidUpdate 1y ago

I'm still convinced that it being called "full self driving" is misleading marketing and really needs to stop, since it isn't according to Tesla

acdha 1y ago
Why do you think Musk put so much money into helping Trump win? Tesla was under multiple investigations for safety and unkept promises, and he knew that he would not have leverage to halt those under a Harris administration.
- thowaway52729 1y ago
  If that was his goal he would have minded his own business after the election, instead of spouting invective posts against Trump on X.
  - Maken 1y ago
    That was after Musk realized he had alienated his entire consumer base.
    - thowaway52729 1y ago
      And he wants to bring them back by alienating Trump while doubling down on his rhetoric?
      - delfinom 1y ago
        He has an ego and narcissism but he isn't dumb. He sees the problems but also cant admit hes wrong or anything.
        sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
        > but he isn't dumb. Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked. “Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk. “I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.” The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist. “Fuck you!” Musk growled. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...

metaphor 1y ago

> Immediately after the wreck at 9:14 p.m. on April 25, 2019, the crucial data detailing how it unfolded was automatically uploaded to the company’s servers and stored in a vast central database, according to court documents. Tesla’s headquarters soon sent an automated message back to the car confirming that it had received the collision snapshot. > Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony. Wow...just wow.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
I am trying to imagine a scenario under which that is defensible and does not raise various questions including compliance, legal, retention. Not to mention, who were the people who put that code into production knowing it would do that. edit: My point is that it was not one lone actor, who would have made that change.
- colejohnson66 1y ago
  Assuming no malice, I'd guess it's for space saving on the car's internal memory. If the data was uploaded off of the car, there’s no point keeping it in the car.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Sounds like a pretty standard telemetry upload. You transmit it, keep your copy until you get acknowledgement that it was received so you can retry if it went wrong, then delete it when it succeeds. It’s just worded to make this sound sketchy. I bet ten bucks “unlinked” just refers to the standard POSIX call for deleting a file.
    - tobias3 1y ago
      Sketchy is that then someone takes “affirmative action to delete” the data on the server as well. Also this is not like some process crash dump where the computer keeps running after one process crashed. This would be like an plane black box uploading its data to the manufacturer, then deleting itself after a plane crash.

estearum 1y ago

Surely this is the behavior of a company that's confident in the safety of its products!

fabian2k 1y ago

Do I understand it correctly? Crash data gets automatically transmitted to Tesla, and after it was transmitted is immediately marked for deletion? If that is actually designed like this, the only reason I could see for it would be so that Tesla has sole access to the data and can decide whether to use it or not. Which really should not work in court, but it seems it has so far. And of course I'd expect an audit trail for the deletion of crash data on Tesla servers. But who knows whether there actually isn't one, or nobody looked into it at all.

Someone 1y ago
Another reason is if there’s other kinds of data that gets uploaded to Tesla, and the code for uploading crash data reuses that code. For the first kind of data, deleting the data from the car the moment there’s confirmation that it now is stored at Tesla can make perfect sense as a mechanism to prevent the car to run out of storage space. Of course, if the car crashed, deleting the data isn’t the optimal, but that it gets deleted may not be malice.
- fabian2k 1y ago
  Deleting after a certain time makes sense, certainly. Deleting immediately seems dubious to me. Though the descriptions in the article are vague enough that we might be missing some big aspects. But in the end we wouldn't be discussing this at all if Tesla had simply handed over the data from their servers. If they can't find it, it isn't actually there or they deliberately removed it this affects how I view this process. Two copies are better than one. If you immediately erase the data, you better be sure the transmitted data is safe and secure. And obviously it wasn't.
- cube00 1y ago
  Data retention is legal's bread and butter. There's no chance such a decision is accidently made by reusing code. Anytime data is recorded legal is immediately asking about retention so they don't end up empty handed in front of a judge. Every byte that car records and how it is managed will be documented in excruciating detail by legal.

chiffre01 1y ago

The description of the guy finding the data while at a Starbucks doesn't do justice to his setup shown in the photo. My dude has a seriously chaotic and awesome setup there.

jalk 1y ago
I imagine, he dumped the car data onto his laptop, so that he could work on the problem in a more cozy place, than his messy bitcave

clipclopflop 1y ago

Years back I bought a model3 infotainment unit on eBay to hack on - it’s absolutely insane at the amount of data contained on them. After gaining access to the system I was able to get the VIN of the car and find the salvage auction from the car it came out of - it had been wrecked. I then was able to get all the location data that gets logged, showing a glimpse of the previous owners life (house, work, stores they went to, etc) as well as the final resting place of the car. The last gps locations logged were at the end of a “T” intersection in North Carolina - google street view gave a nice look at the trees the car most likely hit :>

foobarian 1y ago
Neat! What's the hardware like, a Linux-ish computer with SD cards? Or SSD? Which filesystem?
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  I suspect it's Windows, actually, and I'm pretty sure the UI is some form of C#. They tried to recruit me for the UI. If I lived closer, I would have jumped on it. Not only was I bit of a Tesla fanboy at the time, I used to work across the street from their office and really liked that area. (Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto.)
  - flutas 1y ago
    https://github.com/teslamotors/linux https://github.com/teslamotors/linux
  - dagmx 1y ago
    It’s Linux and the UI is Qt
  - iamjake648 1y ago
    If this were true, Tesla wouldn't have the only use able car infotainment system in the industry.
- clipclopflop 1y ago

firesteelrain 1y ago

If Tesla can’t ensure safeguarding of this information, it’s a feature that will get them in big trouble.

pu_pe 1y ago

Volkswagen was caught cheating on its emission data and the CEO got fired, then prosecuted. Why shouldn't that be the case here?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
You’d need a coalition of Democratic attorneys general to bring a case in the mould of Big Tobacco.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  We'd need a third party if you'd actually want to fight american corporations. Unless you intended "small d" democratic
  - dagmx 1y ago
    Good news, the CEO of this American corporation is making a third party… (the monkey paw curls)
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      A third party... that sounds exactly like the other two. Where is the anti-capitalism party? The anti-war party? The anti-corruption party? Aren't political parties supposed to represent DIFFERENT interests? Instead we're forced to choose between a party hates immigrants and a party that hates immigrants slightly more And like you can criticize republicans, but they actually invested in intel. Wrong company, but a step in the right direction.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > anti-capitalism party? The anti-war party? The anti-corruption party? The first two aren’t as popular as you think. The last is a constant source of political capital.
- croes 1y ago

ddtaylor 1y ago

[flagged]

lexicality 1y ago
The hacker is named and you can see his work in the page. Read TFA
- claar 1y ago
  It's paywalled.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
    https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp
  - ddtaylor 1y ago
    The article is paywalled, but it also only calls the person "the hacker" and then says this: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case. So, we have information that we cannot prove being given by a person who won't testify in court? How is this proper chain of evidence, etc.?
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  From the article: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case.
SilverBirch 1y ago
Tesla said the data recorded during the crash had been lost or deleted. The hacker produced the data. The data was used in court. The verification is the data. What's your suggestion? That they fabricated the data recovered from the car?
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  I'm not accusing anyone of fabricating anything. I'm saying we do not have any way to verify the details. Where is the court document? Isn't this a forensics expert that testified in court? Why aren't they named? Wouldn't most forensics "hackers" be elated to be quoted? From the article: > The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case. It seems like a strange grey zone to have a hacker that uncovers all the information but will not testify in court, etc. I don't see how this wouldn't introduce chain of custody problems, etc. for the evidence which is why he would ultimately be testifying. Perplexing. EDIT - Meh, whatever. If you guys want to read articles that have zero proof and believe whatever they say because some anonymous hacker is quoted, etc. go for it. I don't get paid to educate anyone here.

05 1y ago

Don't worry, once Tesla figures out secure boot nobody will be able to call their bluff and they'll be free to 'lose' crash data with the same impunity the police loses their bodycam footage.

ubunthree 1y ago
This should be modded up higher. Exactly. The only way hackers found this is because they weren’t using secure boot or encrypted images. Every embedded developer knows about MCUboot. Except managers don’t want the overhead because it is complicated. Once embedded devs get the ok all embedded firmware will basically be like a Signal chat with only the manufacturer having the keys. Heck even PSA compliant hardware MUST be resistant to multibit glitch attacks. Bye bye hackers.

OutOfHere 1y ago

With everything that is wrong with Tesla, I'll be the first to say that all Tesla cars need to be taken off of the roads, at least until all of their auto-driving features have been fully removed.

gmd63 1y ago

None of this should be surprising to anyone who has given an ounce of effort to examining Elon's character. Lies about capabilities, timelines, even things as frivolous as being rank one in a video game. He bought Twitter to scale his deception.

h1fra 1y ago

The video is staggering, going super fast before an intersection, with no visibility, a blinking signal, and clear stop sign in sight. I hope FSD got better

whimsicalism 1y ago
not sure if you are saying otherwise but for those who might get confused this crash was with “Autopilot” not FSD, although both are definitely problematic
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> not sure if you are saying otherwise but for those who might get confused this crash was with “Autopilot” not FSD And the distinction is what? I'm not serious of course. There are huge swaths of the public whose eyes would glaze over if you tried to explain it, and that's my point.
  - whimsicalism 1y ago
    i think the public can generally grasp the difference between lane assist and a waymo/AV but the naming is bad agreed
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      Tesla's official, wildly misleading position is that FSD is a driver assist system that should be treated no different than autopilot, not an autonomous system like Waymo. They've stated it in court, in regulatory filings, and if you open the owner's manual you'll find a bolded statement that FSD doesn't make the vehicle autonomous. Everything else that you might be reasonably misled by? Puffery and the official position is that you really should have known better.
      - Sophira 1y ago
        I've seen videos of people literally using the Tesla mobile app to 'call' their FSD-enabled car to them. Given that that they coded this functionality and expose it in their app, I really don't see how Tesla can be let off by making the statement that you must officially be in front of the wheel all of the time.

aurizon 1y ago

Can you imagine air craft makers avoid this sort of black box autodelete! A red handed catch!

Noumenon72 1y ago

They should be saving every crash as a unit test to ensure it never happens again.

inetknght 1y ago
More than a unit test -- a whole system test. But, as a software engineer with experience in robotics and drones with a focus on software safety, yes I 100% agree. The unfortunate thing is that the state of the industry (or, my experience in it) currently is not set up to be able to do that cheaply nor at scale. Imagine you have tens of thousands of various unique problem scenarios to run through, and some might take several minutes of simulation to run the test. Even if your release cadence is slow, but especially if you have continuous deployment with dozens of micro-releases every day: how exactly do you cheaply scale such that simulation testing doesn't become a massive bottleneck?
MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
They should be bending over backwards to ensure they ALWAYS present the crash data even when it inconveniences them. Take the lawsuit "L" but boost public trust. It's worth noting that since this 2019 case I've not seen any legal cases where Tesla did not provide crash data. I think there is a reasonable chance it was honestly mishandled. When considering which parts of the software impact the driving experience, logs are way down the list. They should do better though, and if they intentionally misled anyone they should be punished. For any company to be significantly liable for a lane-keep crash, the behavior would have to be pretty egregious, IMO. All sorts of bad things can happen with most driving enhancements on any car, with common features such as overdrive, cruise control, or powerful engines, or even with non-features like manual transmissions. The liability for all of this should fall on the shoulders of the driver, most of the time, or we'd never get any cars on the road.

throw7 1y ago

After reading the article, I am never buying a Tesla. Props to greenthehacker. may you sip Starbuck's venti-size hot chocolates for many years to come.

lexicality 1y ago
Were you considering buying one before today? I'm curious as to what's different about this autopilot death compared to all the other autopilot deaths that have happened previously. Personally for me it was when the guy in Florida got decapitated when his car drove under a semitruck that made me never want to get in one again.
- sneak 1y ago
  Autopilot is opt-in. You can drive it like any other car and never use autopilot.
  - lexicality 1y ago
    This is very true, but if you had to choose between two microwaves, one of which had a button that occasionally killed people and one which did not, which would you choose? Personally I would feel better buying a microwave that doesn't have the option to decapitate me, even if I would never press it.
    - whimsicalism 1y ago
      all cars have a button that occasionally kills people, it’s called the accelerator pedal
      - lexicality 1y ago
        I think you know that's a false equivalence, both because every control in a car has the possibility of killing you and also because every car has an accelerator pedal and I'm talking about an extra button.

IlikeKitties 1y ago

So, will tesla get nuked from orbit for what is obviously a serious, intentional and systemic discovery violation or is this just ok because it's a big corp?

breadwinner 1y ago

> In the annotated video played for the jury, the vehicle detects a vehicle about 170 feet away. A subsequent frame shows it detecting a pedestrian about 116 feet away. As McGee hurtles closer and closer, the video shows the Tesla planning a path through Angulo’s truck, right where he and his girlfriend were standing behind signs and reflectors highlighting the end of the road. So the Tesla detected the vehicle and the pedestrian, and then plans a path through them? Wow! How bad is this software?

skeezyboy 1y ago
AI is so unlike anything weve ever seen and its going to revolutionise the world and its literally gna be skynet except it pathfinds like a counterstrike bot just ignore that bit
- xgulfie 1y ago
  Just 2 more years bro just 2 more years and we'll have self driving cars working trust me bro
  - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    https://waymo.com/rides/san-francisco/ https://waymo.com/rides/san-francisco/ You can take a Waymo any time of day in SF and they provide 1000s of successful rides daily
    - skeezyboy 1y ago
      And theyve had to spend how many manhours engineering around shit like the above?
      - wuteva 1y ago
        Your point being?
      - overfeed 1y ago

conradev 1y ago

Tesla recanted its employee’s testimony “after discovering evidence inconsistent with his stated recollection of events,” it said. That’s a fancy way to say that he lied

3eb7988a1663 1y ago
That is my big question in this. What happens to the specific employees who provably lied? That sounds like a big no-no, but I wonder in our twisted system if they get some kind of protection as acting on behalf of the company.

fblp 1y ago

No paywall link https://archive.is/s1psp https://archive.is/s1psp

childintime 1y ago

I'd like to hear the law say that self-driving cars should collect data (video, sensor inputs, actuator outputs), and that it is the property of the law when an accident happens. No exceptions. The real question is how the law is written, for it should leave no doubt about what Tesla, or any other, is required to do. Probably all cars should have a black box, as both modern electronics and humans can do weird stuff.

whimsicalism 1y ago
good luck passing such a law in the US
coolspot 1y ago
That’s the case in California for autonomous vehicles (like Waymo). Tesla FSD is officially a driver’s assistance, not fully autonomous vehicle.

outside1234 1y ago

This will continue until people go to prison

de6u99er 1y ago

So first the data wasn't there, and suddenly it is there. I think the only way to prevent tis in the future is to litigate against those individuals who knowingly lie for a company.

alphawhisky 1y ago
Litigate the company, not the individual. The hiding of the data was almost certainly a result of company ethos and most likely involved multiple levels of people. The maintenance tech was probably the lowest paid of everyone involved.

declan_roberts 1y ago

Everyone is mad at Tesla but they're literally the only company collecting this kind of crash metadata. Other car manufacturers would never get in trouble for this because it's not even possible for them to do it in the first place!

fred_is_fred 1y ago
Wrong. Almost all modern cars track location and tons of other data. Ford even has a screen that pops-up saying basically "hey you're opting into this FYI".
- declan_roberts 1y ago
  You think other cars are recording whether they detected a person and the approximate location of the person to the car?
  - inetknght 1y ago
    I certainly think that. Because, as a software engineer in robotics and drones, that's exactly what I would do. Using logs to recreate the scenario, especially for regression testing, is standard process for competent software engineers.
jeremyjh 1y ago
Everyone is mad because they killed people and lied about it.
jdiff 1y ago
People aren't mad that they collect the data, everyone does that, but that they immediately deleted it, then lied about it ever happening, in a matter of life and death. I would deeply encourage you to re-assess whatever led you to make this comment, because you have fallen wildly off the mark here. Corporations are not your friend.

LightBug1 1y ago

Huge props to the hacker (@greentheonly) ... considering the cutbacks in journalism, perhaps we're entering a world where some of the most important investigative journalism will be done by hackers. Unpaid, unrewarded excellence.

skeezyboy 1y ago

the dirtiest of doggery

rcpt 1y ago

Cruise was shut down for less than this. TSLA won't even have a down day. Corruption pays

Fricken 1y ago
GM execs shut Cruise down. I suspect they were just looking for an excuse.

buyucu 1y ago

Another day, another example of Tesla doing shady things.

sershe 1y ago

"AI drivers" glitch/fail differently than human drivers, and in ways that to humans look bizarre and easily preventable. Human driver failures (like being tired, drunk, very upset, or being on your phone, distracted by passengers, etc), to humans, look understandable, but from an AI perspective they look bizarre and easily preventable. In theory, what we should care about is which ones cause more deaths or accidents. The fact that AI accidents seem worse based on naive intuition shouldn't matter. However, humans serve on juries so here we go... Would there be a 200 million dollar judgement against someone who tried to get a can of pop from the back seat, ran over a pedestrian and then tried to lie about e.g. whether the light was red?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"A shareholder lawsuit in Texas filed this month alleges Tesla defrauded investors with its promotion of autonomous driving technology." https://ia600903.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172857934/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172857934.1.0.pdf https://ia600903.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.txwd.11...