Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla’s damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.
That’s where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, “for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there.”
During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn’t hidden the data, but lost it. The company’s lawyer told the Post that Tesla’s data handling practices were “clumsy” and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.
“We didn’t think we had it, and we found out we did… And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information,” said Tesla’s lawyer, Joel Smith.