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One key piece of evidence recovered by a hacker has forced Elon Musk's Tesla to pay $243,000,000 to the victims of a 2019 in a historic lawsuit, as shocking crash data was uncovered.
This is far from the first time that Tesla has been involved in controversy surrounding the self-driving capacity of its cars, as while some of that has come from investor frustrations that the tech isn't ready, there have been plenty of other potentially dangerous incidents that have given what the company calls 'Autopilot' a bad reputation.
Despite claims from studies that self-driving technology is almost always safer than a human-operated vehicle, there have been numerous incidents where either Full Self-Driving (FSD) or Autopilot have malfunctioned and led to a crash, including one even that saw a Tesla vehicle drive off of a parking garage roof.
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One tragic crash involving Autopilot has now left Tesla in serious legal trouble, as the electric car company has been told to pay out $243 million to the victims of an accident despite rejecting a $60 million settlement offer, and it all kicked off with shocking data sourced by a hacker.
As reported by the New York Post, Naibel Benavides Leon and Dillion Angulo were struck by a Tesla Model S vehicle using Autopilot in 2019, with he former tragically passing away and the latter left with serious injuries.
Both Angulo and Benavides' family decided to launch a lawsuit against Tesla, specifically claiming that Autopilot was the cause of the crash, and that case recently reached a verdict where the court indicated that both Elon Musk's company and the driver of the Model S were at fault.
One critical piece of data was initially missing from the record, as Tesla claimed that the 'collision snapshot' which captured the car using Autopilot technology was missing, yet this was subsequently recovered and shared by a hacker known only as @greentheonly, as per the Washington Post.
The hacker claims that he found the file "within minutes" while at a Starbucks, and confirmed that it had been immediately transferred to Tesla's servers after the crash.
What the data then revealed that that the cameras inside the Model S spotted a vehicle around 170 feet away and a pedestrian roughly 116 feet from the car, and despite this it continued its course, resulting in the horrific crash.
Joel Smith, the lawyer representing Tesla in the case, argued: "We didn't think we had it, and we found out we did [...] This is an amazingly helpful piece of information."
He also claimed that the company had been 'clumsy' in failing to retrieve the information, yet denied that there was any misconduct at play. However, the lawyer for the plaintiffs alleged that Tesla had "deceived" investigators about the data "before the cops had even arrived."
