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This whole story is insane. Tesla apparently did everything it could to avoid providing the data it had about its Autopilot crash. This is just a snippet and there's a lot more. electrek.co/2025/08/04/t...

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Thing that I as an in house lawyer find interesting about this is that Tesla was willing to delete the original file from the car, mislead the police, engage in discovery shenanigans, and fight disclosure but at the same time retained the data on its servers instead of destroying it.

That part (deleting the version on the car) is the one thing that strikes me as reasonable given my assumptions/experience in how software is written. I expect the upload function is used for much more than crash logs, and so you need to clean up the files you upload or you fill the flash[0]

There's a big difference between scheduled automatic deletion to make space vs push message to trigger deletion. Do we know which it was? Especially with the car no longer being driven, and attempting to retrieve the logs quickly, they should've been able to find them unless it's <24h rotation

On one hand you could maybe twist this as Tesla supporting drivers privacy rights but the fact that they have and kept the data and lied rather than say fighting the request in court says otherwise.

What's particularly important to note for the "before Elon was crazy" crowd... this case alone goes back SEVEN YEARS. Tesla has always been a **shitty** company run by a shitty TechnoKing. Pretending otherwise, now, because a Nazi salute makes you uncomfortable, doesn't change the track record.

Besides the obvious perjury issues, this is likely to result in previous cases being re-opened as it has been shown Tesla was engaged in a criminal fraud to suppress evidence. The liability could easily eat up Tesla's reserves.

This has long been a concern for me -- the ownership of one's own driving data and an obligation for preservation and transparency should be codified in law. And anyone buying a car with a lot of software really needs to pay attention to the EULA.

Musk could take a wet, sloppy shit, and that shit would have more integrity than he does. Lying, cheating, denying, blocking, gaslighting, abusing, and demeaning is his entire career. Not to mention the indirect murder of hundreds of thousands through killing USAID. Musk is human cancer.

The Lancet predicts that 65 million people will die by 2030 from Elon’s destruction of USAID. That’s 8x the number of civilians Hitler murdered. Elon needs to be mentioned in the same sentence as guys like Hitler & Pol Pot. At The Hague.

Why aren’t they prosecuting Tesla and its pertinent parties for failure to provide evidence demanded in Subpoenas? This is criminal and should be an easy felony especially when deaths are involved!