Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
podcast This. Is a show where we discuss the
critical crossroads that shape SpaceX.
Tesla X, The Boring Company and Neurolink I'm your.
Host will. Walden.
A federal jury in Miami ordered Tesla to pay 43, excuse me, $243
million last month after a 2019 crash in Florida killed 22 year
old Nabel Benavides Leon and left her boyfriend Dylan Angelo
with life changing injuries. Of the verdict hanged on a
single file that Tesla said did not exist until a hacker found
it inside a Starbucks. How did Tesla lose critical
crash data tied to its own Autopilot system, then claim it
didn't exist, only to have it recovered by a third party years
later? A hacker.
Now this raises doubts about how Tesla stores, retrieves, and
controls access to information that can make or break lawsuits
about its driver assistance features.
Tesla denied withholding the file and said it couldn't locate
it. But the jury didn't buy that
explanation, especially after the plaintiff's team proved the
data had been on Tesla servers all along.
Now, the crash occurred on April 25th, 2019 in Key Largo.
George McGee was driving a Tesla Model S on Autopilot when he
looked away from the road to pick up his dropped phone.
Car slammed into Anglo's truck, parked at the end of a dark Rd.
where Anglo and Benavides Leon stood behind hazard reflectors.
McGee later settled separately, admitting he was using Autopilot
at the time. But the civil lawsuit targeted
Tesla, accusing the company of negligence for allowing
Autopilot to operate on that road and for failing to alert
the driver of the situation. Now, Tesla told the court didn't
have the collision snapshot, which is a key internal data
file that logs exactly what the vehicle saw, sensed and planned
in the moments before a crash. Plaintiffs believed it would
show that the car failed to detect the couple, failed to
warn the driver and proceeded with a deadly maneuver.
Tesla eventually said it had simply missed the file.
In reality, a hacker known online as Green The only found
it. That discovery happened inside
of Miami Starbucks. The hacker, who had spent years
reverse engineering Tesla's hardware, ran a forensic image
of the vehicle's Autopilot controlling unit on his laptop
and found the deleted file within minutes.
He also found evidence that Tesla had received the data
moments after the crash, meaning the company had a copy from the
start and test to confirm this in court.
Calling oversight clumsy but denied any intent to deceive.
Now, the Miami jury didn't need long to deliberate and ruled
that Tesla was 33% liable for the crash and ordered the
company to pay damages. The remaining responsibility
fell on the driver. The plaintiffs attorneys argued
that Tesla misled investigators and withheld access to vital
evidence for years. They said Tesla attempted to
settle quietly before trial, but the family wanted the truth
public now. Court records reveal the data
had indeed been uploaded to Tesla servers automatically
after the crash, but according to internal testimony, it was
then unlinked test, the standard protocol for separating vehicle
data from specific incidents. Later, an engineer testified
that someone had likely taken affirmative action to delete the
central server copy as well, although the court found no
evidence this was intentional, and the judge ordered Tesla to
reimburse the plaintiffs for costs related to data recovery
now. That effort to recover the data
began years later, when Florida Highway Patrol turned over the
original Autopilot unit to the plaintiff's team.
The hacker flown in by the legal team warned against Tesla's
request to boot up the unit, saying it could trigger
automatic updates that would overwrite the file.
Instead, he extracted the contents himself.
What he found was exactly what the family had been looking for,
a complete record of what the Tesla saw as it speed toward the
victims. By using that data, the hacker
generated A detailed augmented video for the courtroom.
Frame by frame. It showed the Tesla detecting a
car and then a pedestrian, yet continuing to plan a path
straight through their location. Tesla argued the video proved
the driver had enough time to react, and the Plano said it
confirmed the system failed at every critical moment.
Tesla's legal team framed the situation as an honest mistake.
His lawyer told jurors the company would never hide helpful
evidence, simply didn't realize the file had been preserved.
The plaintiff's attorneys described a pattern of
obstruction, arguing that Tesla had evidence before the cops
even arrived on the scene and only admitted to having it after
they found another way to retrieve it.
Now, this was not Tesla's first trial involving Autopilot, but
it may be the most consequential.
The $240 million verdict marked the company's largest public
loss over its driver assistance tech to date.
Within weeks, investors filed a lawsuit in Texas accusing Tesla
of misleading the market about the safety and reliability of
its systems, citing the Miami case.
Other families are now preparing similar claims, including one in
California tied to the death of a 15 year old.
Federal regulators have repeatedly investigated Tesla
over Autopilot, and the system has been involved in dozens of
crashes, many fatal. Tesla has beaten two such
lawsuits in the past and settled others before they reach trial.
But the Miami case added new pressure, producing internal
records, engineer testimony and digital files that other
plaintiffs will now use to build their own cases.
One example is attorney Mark Dobin, who recently what a
refund for the $10,600 he paid for Full Self Driving Software
after an arbiter ruled Tesla never delivered the promise
features. He said Musk Musk's public
claims had created unrealistic expectations, and the Miami case
showed what happens when the confidence turns deadly.
Tesla has declined us to comment on the outcome, except to say it
plans to appeal. A judge said she did not find
enough evidence that Tesla deliberately destroyed or
withheld the data, but she agreed the company had
mishandled it and ordered reimbursement of the cost
incurred by the plaintiffs to retrieve it.
The hacker who helped find the data says future cases may not
be so lucky. Tesla has since tightened its
security protocols, making it harder for independent analysts
to access internal crash data. Now they believe that's part of
the problem sometimes, he said. You just have to get the data
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