A Tesla engineer has admitted that the company did not keep records on Autopilot crashes for its first three years deployed.
With so many massive and well-publicized safety issues, nothing should surprise us about Tesla’s internal culture — but new revelations from the country’s first federal Autopilot crash trial have us shaken once again.
As Law360 reports, an engineer at Elon Musk’s car company revealed during a wrongful death trial this week that until 2018, the company didn’t even keep records of Autopilot crashes — even though the assisted driving feature had been rolled out three years prior.
In a taped deposition shown to jurors in the federal case against Tesla, which stems from a wrongful death lawsuit involving a young woman who was killed by a distracted driver who’d been using Autopilot, software engineer Akshay Phatak admitted that keeping such records was not part of the company’s early compliance practices.
Tesla has, as the report notes, tried to keep that deposition out of the trial centered around the 2019 Florida crash that killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and caused a brain injury for her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.
