>> That's 100% wrong. In standard practice, collision files are to be "locked", prevented from local deletion.
I worked a year in airbag control, and they recorded a bit of information if the bags were deployed - seatbelt buckle status was one thing. But I was under the impression there was no legal requirement for that. I'm sure it helps in court when someone tries to sue because they were injured by an airbag. The argument becomes not just "the bags comply with the law" but also "you weren't wearing your seatbelt". Regardless, I'm sure Tesla has a lot more data than that and there is likely no legal requirement to keep it - especially if it's been transferred reliably to the server.
I don't think its wrong, have you ever pushed code that was technically correct, only to find months later that you, your PM, their manager, their boss' boss, etc all missed one edge case? You're telling me no software developer has ever done this?
In a perfect world where developers are omnipresent and all knowing sure? This isn't a perfect world. Heck, how do you account for the developer who coded it leaving the company, and now that code has been untouched for half a decade if not more, because nothing is seemingly wrong with the code, what then? Who realizes it needs to be changed? Nobody. The number of obscure bugs I find in legacy code that stump even the most experienced maintainers never ends.
There have been dozens of government investigations and lawsuits around Tesla crashes over the past decade (more likely hundreds or thousands, I'm just thinking of the ones that received significant national press and that I happened to notice.) In each of these cases, Tesla's data retention was questioned, sometimes by regulators and sometimes as a major legal question in the case. There is no way in 2025 that the retention process around crash data is some niche area of Tesla's code that the business leaders haven't thought about extremely carefully.
This is like saying "maybe nobody has recently looked at the ad-selection mechanism at Google." That's just not plausible.
It's not an edge case; it's wanton criminal sabotage, destruction of evidence, and it deserves a prison sentence for anyone facilitating it at any level.
This is assuming malice out of the gate without any evidence, which is not what we do here on HN. If this is in fact maliciously done, please provide evidence.
