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Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.
Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.
The hacker’s discovery would become a key piece of evidence presented during a trial that began last month in Miami federal court, which dissected the final moments before the collision and ended in a historic $243 million verdict against the company.
The pivotal and previously unreported role of a hacker in accessing that information points to how valuable Tesla’s data is when its futuristic technology is involved in a crash. While Tesla said it has produced similar data in other litigation, the Florida lawsuit reflects how a jury’s perception of Tesla’s cooperation in recovering such data can play into a judgment in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The company’s driver-assistance technology includes features that automatically control a Tesla’s speed and steering, and are programmed to react when an obstacle, such as another vehicle or a pedestrian, is in its path. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has referred to its vehicle as a “very sophisticated computer on wheels” and said Tesla is a “software company as much as it is a hardware company.” He has positioned the company’s most advanced iteration of driver-assistance available to consumers, Full Self-Driving, as “the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”
The batch of data the plaintiffs were after, internally referred to as a collision snapshot, showed exactly what the vehicle’s cameras detected before the crash, including the young woman who was killed. The plaintiffs’ attorneys said they believed the data would present a damning picture of the system’s shortcomings, and the hacker — who for years had been taking Autopilot computers apart and cloning their data — was confident he could find it.
“For any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there,” the hacker told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The hacker, known online by his X handle @greentheonly, did not testify in the case.
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Hadn't seen this one posted, apologies if it was, but DAMN.
You want to know what these rich assholes think about you?
They'd rather outright lie than ever see you get justice.
Listen to this prick:
Joel Smith, Tesla’s attorney, said in an interview that the company was “clumsy” in its handling of the data but did not engage in any impropriety with regard to it. “It is the most ridiculous perfect storm you’ve ever heard,” Smith said, in an effort to explain why Tesla was unable to produce the collision snapshot data until after the hacker retrieved it for the plaintiffs.
In court, Smith told jurors in his opening statement that Tesla would “never think about hiding” the data because it proved that the driver had time to react to the pedestrians standing by their parked car had he been paying attention.
“We didn’t think we had it, and we found out we did,” he said. “And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information.”
Garbage.
