According to news on August 5, a jury in Florida, USA, recently reviewed a case involving a 2019 case.TeslaAutonomous drivingThe company ruled that Tesla should bear partial responsibility for the fatal car accident and ordered it to pay a total of approximately US$243 million in compensation to the families of the victims and the injured. The accident resulted in the death of one woman and serious injuries to another person.
The newly disclosed court records reveal a deeper problem: In order to avoid its autonomous driving system taking responsibility for the accident, Tesla is accused of not only concealing key evidence and lying about it, but also misleading the police and the plaintiff.
It is said that just three minutes after the accident, the Model S involved automatically packaged and uploaded key data including video, CAN bus stream and EDR data to Tesla's server, and automatically deleted the local backup, making Tesla the sole holder of this data.
In the following years, the injured party and the police launched a long "data tug-of-war" with Tesla in order to obtain this data that was crucial to clarifying responsibility for the accident. Based on the complete chain of evidence disclosed in court, the truth of this case gradually emerged.
Act 1: Snapshots of a collision that “never happened”
On April 25, 2019, about three minutes after the collision, a Tesla Model S uploaded a file named "snapshot_collision_airbag-deployment.tar" to the company's server and subsequently deleted the local copy.
Alan Moore, an accident reconstruction expert and mechanical engineer hired by the families of the victims, used technical means to recover relevant records from the vehicle's autonomous ECU (electronic control unit). Moore confirmed that Tesla had this "crash snapshot" from the beginning, but that the company "decoupled" it from the vehicle in the background so that it appeared to have never existed in the system.
Since then, the plaintiff has repeatedly requested access to this data, but Tesla has always insisted that the data does not exist.
Act 2: The "guided" police investigation
On May 23, 2019, Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) investigator Riso contacted Tesla to seek telemetry data in order to reconstruct the accident process. Tesla lawyer Ryan McCarthy, whom he contacted, said a subpoena was not required to obtain the data, adding: "You write me a letter and I'll tell you what to put in the letter."
At the time, Rizzo did not view Tesla as an opponent in the case. However, when McCarthy "directed" the content of the letter, he deliberately omitted the crash snapshot containing video, EDR, CAN bus and Autopilot data. Instead, he provided the police with infotainment system data, call logs and a copy of the owner's manual, but did not provide actual crash telemetry data from the Autopilot ECU.
Tesla's methods became more deceptive when Rizzo tried to extract data directly from the vehicle's computer. The company arranged for technicians to meet with Rizzo and pretended to help him read the data. But in fact, Tesla had already stored all the data on its own servers, but it lured Risso to the service center and claimed on the spot that the data was "corrupted" and could not be read.
It was not until a few years later that Moore, a forensic engineer hired by the plaintiff, discovered after contacting the ECU that Tesla had indeed started the ECU on June 19, 2019, and that the data was fully accessible.
Act III: Court intervention and the “resurrection” of data
Between 2019 and 2024, Tesla denied and concealed relevant evidence several times in its communications with the police, plaintiffs, and courts. By the end of 2024, the court finally allowed the plaintiff to hire a third-party expert to access the autonomous driving ECU to try to extract the data that Tesla claimed was "corrupted."
The court gave forensic engineers permission to perform "bit-by-bit NAND flash imaging," a technology that completely replicates all information on a chip. Engineers soon discovered that all the data was still intact, despite Tesla's previous insistence that it was corrupted.
More critically, Moore discovered metadata named "snapshot_collision_airbag deployment.tar" within the data, which included its SHA 1 checksum and exact server path.
Act 4: Final Confession in Server Logs
In May 2025, with the help of the newly discovered metadata, the plaintiff was able to issue a subpoena to Tesla, requesting it to provide AWS server logs.
Although Tesla still resisted, it eventually handed over the original TAR files and access logs under pressure from the sanctions hearing. Logs show that the data has been stored on its servers since three minutes after the incident on April 25, 2019. At this point, Tesla had to admit that they had the data from the beginning.
The plaintiff's lawyer pointed out during the trial that Tesla had already used the data to conduct its own internal analysis: "The data showed that Autopilot was engaged, the vehicle's acceleration and speed, and that the driver's hands had been removed from the steering wheel."
Finale: The truth puzzle before the jury
In July 2025, the full picture of the incident was finally presented to the jury last month and significantly affected the final verdict.
The final recovered data clearly revealed the following:
• Autopilot was enabled at the time of the incident.
• The vehicle is controlled by an automatic steering system.
• No overriding manual braking or steering actions by the driver were detected.
• Although the vehicle was approaching a T-intersection and there was a stationary vehicle ahead, the system did not register any "immediate takeover" warning.
• Autopilot's map data shows that the area should have been an "Autosteer restricted area," but the system did not disable autonomous driving or issue a warning, and still allowed the vehicle to drive at full speed.
Moore commented: "The Tesla map was marked and the car knew it was in a restricted area, but Autopilot neither deactivated nor issued a warning."
This is crucial to the case because one of the core issues is thatWhether Tesla allows users to use the autopilot feature in non-highway scenarios where its system is not fully adapted.The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had earlier warned Tesla: "System safeguards should be combined to limit the conditions for use of the automatic driving control system to ensure that it is only used under conditions designed for this purpose (the vehicle's operational design domain)."
Although the driver himself admitted responsibility for the accident,The plaintiffs' primary goal is to place some of the blame on Tesla for failing to devise effective mechanisms to prevent such apparent abuse of the system.The plaintiff’s logic is that if Tesla had implemented geofencing and more effective driver monitoring, the driver might not have been able to use Autopilot on that stretch of road at all, thus possibly avoiding this tragedy.
More importantly, it also reflects that Tesla’s Autopilot system failed to fulfill its repeatedly claimed core capability of preventing accidents from happening in the first place. (little)
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