this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Holy fucking shit. What is the purpose of deleting the data on the vehicle other than to sabotage the owner of the vehicle?
The only thing making this nazi company its market value and all the hype is promis of self driving. The autopilot technology is the main value. If there will be proof of it is wrong, Tesla gonna loose the investors. Simply as that, fucking nazi Musk cannot allow proof that his shitty car killed peoples because of the autopilot. I recommend to search for podcast and reporting by The Guardian on this theme. I’m really looking forward to read the book Tesla files. It’s from the journalist who was contacted by Tesla whistleblower. There are thousands cases when the autopilot started to behave just “little crazy”.
Smells like intentional destruction of evidence.
Criminal destruction of evidence.
Criminal withholding of evidence.
Information to be used against you and never for you.
That jumped out at me too. Giving the benefit of the doubt, it could be that this “snapshot” includes a very large amount of data that could be problematic if stored locally for longer. In reality, they probably do it this way for exactly this type of situation, so they can retain full control of the potentially-damning data.
Bullshit. It was saved locally. It can stay saved locally but be marked for deletion if storage gets tight. This is a solved computer science problem.
There is zero reason to delete it immediate except to cover their asses.
If I was on the jury I'd be pushing for maximum monetary penalty.
Treble damages
If they can transmit it, it is not a lot. It is that simple.
Nearly all of the vehicles have 4G/5G connectivity via AT&T. This isn't a dial up connection. They can transmit whatever the fuck they want.
Still, if it's small enough to transmit via any wireless connection they can easily keep the local copy.
Mate, a 1 TB micro SD costs less than 100 $. How much does a high bandwidth high/no data limit 5G connection cost and how long would that need to actually transmit that much?
What sensor data is there even supposed to be? Even at 1 millisecond resolution we are talking about megabytes.
That's not "benefit of the doubt", that's "playing devil's advocate". They probably used something like this.
It is possible that the data is just never saved in non-volatile memory meaning that once power is lost that the values are also lost. In which case its not really deleting the information but rather just that information is just never intentionally saved.
P.S. I am not a tesla fan boy just wanted to give this tiny insight.
This explanation is completely fabricated, based on nothing, and nonsense.
It is obviously critical data that nobody halfway competent would write to ram. Also video data is very large and makes no sense to store in ram.
Furthermore the article says it was deleted and they later recovered it which would not have been possible with RAM
Basically why are you pushing this drivel.
If the data is temporarily stored until it is transmitted and then is not considered to be needed anymore I see no reason as to why that would need to be stored locally forever.
Because it may not be possible to transmit depending on location. Also non violtile storage is cheap and fast and ram is normally limited
On embedded controllers you are usually heavily limited with nonvolatile memory.
Not sure why you think this, it’s generally trivial to add non-volatile storage to microcontrollers, and much more complicated to add external RAM.
Perhaps most importantly although we know it was not so lost because we read the article or at least the summary if it had been it would have been a deliberate design decision to have it be so.
Your explanation doesn't wash in reality but it also doesn't wash even in theory.
You're also making assumptions in that the volatile memory lost power and thus must have been cleared at some point. I dont think there is a right or a wrong based on the knowledge i have I just am throwing out a random guess.
The article says Tesla deletes it and was forced to produce it. Seems pretty obvious that your theory is wrong
Forensic analysis managed to retrieve this data, so it must have been stored in non-volatile memory.
Didnt the article say they retrieved the filename and hash, thus proving the existence of the crash diagnostic snapshot. After which Tesla handed over their copy?
Or did the forensics retrieve the actual data?
Edit: Given the importance of this type of data, not saving it to non-voletile memory is negligent at best. Even if it required a huge amount of space, they could delete unimportant files like the Spotify cache or apps or whatever
The article kind of fumbles the wording and creates confusion. There are, however, some passages that indicate to me that the actual data was recovered. All of the following are taking about the NAND flash memory.
It seems that maybe the .tar file itself was not recovered, but all the data about the crash was still there.
Yeah, this is a good point. Also, another comment said it’s possible the data snapshot is very large, so it’s not intended to be stored locally.
Either way, if you are sending data about my car to a server, it better be easy for me to get this data if needed.
Don't these keep a video record of every time a squirrel gets too close to the parked car?
Another m.2 under the dash isn't going to kill the electric vehicles battery, this isn't an excuse.
those are saved on external drives. That being said, they could also have it set to save something like this to the external storage if it was too large for the internal memory as well.
Videos aren't saved without the external drive.
Hell, it could be that this is private information about the driver and the car's probably gonna end up in a Copart auction after insurance is done with it, so in a way they're protecting PII.
Before anyone's gonna accuse me of Tesla fanboyism (I do make a lot of devil's advocate style comments), I've driven exactly one Tesla in my life, decided it's a piece of shit with a great powertrain and OK infotainment but absolutely lacking UX for drivers, and a ridiculously plain interior. I will never buy a Tesla unless it's a used Tesla S or X with a newish battery for 10k because at that price it'd just be the cheapest way to get a luxury EV lol
I doubt they’re doing a full OS wipe when an accident occurs. So PII data would still be on there.
Just stuff you voluntarily save if the crash data is in RAM only. RAM gets autowiped.
What PII is there? It's a fucking dash cam video, it's not my blood results from my annual checkup.
Full home address via recordings of where you live would be PII, or with the "home address" option set for automations.