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

(www.washingtonpost.com)
650 points clcaev | 2 comments | 29 Aug 25 11:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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metaphor ◴[29 Aug 25 12:25 UTC] No.45063162[source]▶
> 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.

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A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 ◴[29 Aug 25 12:39 UTC] No.45063302[source]▶
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.

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colejohnson66 ◴[29 Aug 25 12:43 UTC] No.45063366[source]▶
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.
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wat10000 ◴[29 Aug 25 12:57 UTC] No.45063520[source]▶
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.

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tobias3 ◴[29 Aug 25 13:03 UTC] No.45063580[source]▶
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.

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wat10000 ◴[29 Aug 25 13:07 UTC] No.45063612[source]▶
I’ll bet another ten bucks that this is a generic implementation for all of their telemetry, not something special cased for crashes.

Deleting the data on the server is totally sketchy, but that’s not what the quoted section is about.

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1. dylan604 ◴[29 Aug 25 13:43 UTC] No.45064051{6}[source]▶
How handling an automobile crash not as a special case is the weird part. Even in the <$50 dashcams from Amazon there is a feature to mark a recording as locked so the auto delete logic does not touch the locked file. Some of them even have automatic collision detection which locks the file for you.

How Tesla could say that detecting a collision and not locking all/any of the data is normal is just insane.

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2. immibis ◴[29 Aug 25 14:41 UTC] No.45064777[source]▶
That one's easy: nobody at Tesla cares about having this feature