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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

The process of collecting and uploading the data probably confuses a lot of non-technical readers even if it worked as per standard industry practices.

The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted. There's no technical reason to dispose of data related to a crash when you hold so much data on all of the cars in general.

Crash data in particular should be considered sacred, especially given the severity in this case. Ideally it should be kept both on the local black box and on the servers. But anything that leads to it being treated as instantly disposable everywhere, or even just claiming it was deleted, can only be malice.

> The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted. There's no technical reason to dispose of data related to a crash when you hold so much data on all of the cars in general.

My money is on nobody built a tool to look up the data, so they have it, they just can't easily find it.