The Autopilot team is one of Tesla’s most mysterious departments, and little is known about it from the outside world.A document recently unsealed in Florida reveals how Tesla keeps this mysterious team secret. In a sworn statement in a court case involving an Autopilot death, Tesla engineer Christopher Payne detailed how the company protects the technology behind its driver-assisted systems.
He disclosed that,Even Autopilot team members do not have access to some files and software, and employees involved in developing Autopilot only have access to a few files.
When deeper documents need to be used, they must be reviewed by the team leader and superiors, and it must be proven to them that these documents must be used in the work before they can be approved.
The unsealed documents pointed out that Tesla took a lot of measures to protect Autopilot technology from being leaked.The computers of team employees have a special password mechanism, which sometimes requires a lot of multi-factor authentication to unlock. At the same time, the USB interface is also locked to prevent employees from "inserting a USB flash drive and taking away confidential files".
In addition, employees of the Autopilot team are required to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) before joining the company. They will be assigned to an exclusive office building. They need to use exclusive badges to enter and exit. The working floors are divided according to the importance of confidentiality, and they are completely inaccessible to each other.
The Autopilot team is extremely well paid and operates relatively independently.But even internal members only understand part of the team structure, while employees in other parts of Tesla know nothing..
