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.
If they can transmit it, it is not a lot. It is that simple.
Nearly all of the vehicles have 4G/5G connectivity via AT&T. This isn’t a dial up connection. They can transmit whatever the fuck they want.
Still, if it’s small enough to transmit via any wireless connection they can easily keep the local copy.
Mate, a 1 TB micro SD costs less than 100 $. How much does a high bandwidth high/no data limit 5G connection cost and how long would that need to actually transmit that much?
What sensor data is there even supposed to be? Even at 1 millisecond resolution we are talking about megabytes.