An anonymous hacker well-versed in Tesla technology played a crucial and previously unreported role in helping plaintiffs achieve a massive $243 million verdict against the EV maker, The Washington Post reported.
Although Tesla initially claimed that it could not locate vital data about a crash that killed one person and severely injured another, the hacker was able to retrieve the data from a chip that had been recovered from the Tesla involved in the wreck, according to the Post.
Soon after Tesla learned that the plaintiffs had access to the data, which included video recordings of the moments leading up to the fatal crash, the company said it was able to locate the data on its own servers, per the Post.
“For any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there,” the anonymous hacker, who did not share his name out of fear of retribution, told the Post. It should be mentioned that it is also possible that the hacker’s success in finding it helped the company to know where to look, but even with that benefit of the doubt, the optics aren’t great.
What’s happening?
In 2019, George Brian McGee, a Florida finance executive, was driving his Tesla in Key West, Florida. The vehicle was operating in Autopilot mode.
When McGee dropped his phone and took his eyes off the road to pick it up, the Tesla failed to detect a stop sign at a T-shaped intersection. The vehicle went plowing through the stop sign and off the road into a parked vehicle, striking two people who were standing outside of the parked car, The New York Times reported in 2021.
The crash killed Naibel Venavides, a 22-year-old college student, and severely injured Dillon Angulo, her boyfriend.
While the crash was not the first, nor the last, fatal incident involving Tesla’s controversial Autopilot feature, it was the first to go to trial before a jury.
The result was a landmark $243 million judgment against the automaker.
While all of this information has been publicly available, what was not known until The Washington Post’s report was the role that the anonymous hacker had played in retrieving the vital crash data.
Tesla denied concealing the crash data, calling its handling of the data retrieval “clumsy,” in the words of Joel Smith, a Tesla attorney.
“It is the most ridiculous perfect storm you’ve ever heard,” Smith said, per the Post, describing the circumstances behind Tesla’s failure to retrieve the data until the company found out in court that the plaintiffs already were in possession of it.
“We didn’t think we had it, and we found out we did,” Smith explained, per the Post.
Tesla has filed a motion to appeal the $243 million judgment, according to The New York Times.
Why is the $243 million verdict against Tesla important?
As driver-assistance technology has become both more sophisticated and more commonplace, it has raised a number of legal and ethical questions.
With robotaxis already operating in a number of U.S. cities, how society answers these questions will shape the future of transportation.
Though the technology is remarkably complex, the central question behind it is relatively straightforward: Who bears responsibility when a self-driving vehicle crashes?
Despite Tesla for years publicly touting the supposed reliability of its Autopilot and more advanced Full Self-Driving modes, in court, the company’s answer has been consistent: Drivers remain fully responsible for crashes, whether or not driver-assistance features had failed.
With its $243 million verdict, the Florida jury rebuffed that argument with a resounding answer of its own: Tesla was at least partially responsible for the crash due to the Autopilot failure.
What’s being done about the safety of self-driving cars?
With Tesla already having appealed the nearly quarter-billion-dollar verdict, only time will tell whether the jury’s decision stands.
However, the case highlighted the need for lawmakers and government regulators to step in and clarify who bears responsibility when self-driving software fails, often with deadly consequences.
Some government entities have tried holding automakers accountable. In California, the DMV has been seeking a 30-day ban on Tesla sales in the state as punishment for what it says were Tesla’s false claims about the capabilities of its self-driving features.
While it is important that victims and government entities alike seek to hold Tesla accountable, this sort of piecemeal approach will be insufficient to protect drivers, passengers, and innocent bystanders from self-driving failures.
To help push for reasonable government regulations on self-driving technology, you can use your voice and contact your elected representatives to let them know where you stand.
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