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. Model S driver George McGee had reached to pick up his dropped cell phone when operating in Autopilot and, when his eyes were off the road, plowed through a stop sign and into the pair, who were stargazing on the side of the road.

That driver, McGee, settled with the plaintiffs after pleading no-contest to reckless driving in 2019 and was sentenced to a mere 16 hours of traffic school, Law360 notes. Tesla, on the other hand, declined to settle, leading Angulo and Benavides' family to confront the company in court, alleging that its overhyped marketing about Autopilot's capabilities had resulted in the fatal crash.

"I feel like we were experimented on," Angulo told Miami's NBC affiliate back in 2023, "and this technology was out on the road before it was safe."

Along with trying to spin Benavides' death and Angulo's maiming as a result of reckless driving and not Autopilot, Tesla attorney Joel Smith insisted that the assisted driving feature wasn't even engaged during the crash because he'd put his foot on the gas pedal, which disables the glorified cruise control.

The attorney went on to say that when McGee accelerated, he was met with a message on his car's screen that said he could not brake when using cruise control — a confusing detail in an already-complex case, and one that could well shoot Tesla in the foot as the trial progresses.

In such an undeniably complicated trial, these strange admissions from Tesla representatives seem to show the company's hand even while it tries to prove a point. If Autopilot was so important to the company's future, why were there no crash records for its first three years it was deployed — and why did it bar McGee from braking, which could have saved Benavides' life?

More on Autopilot: Elon Musk Lost It on a Call With the Government After Autopilot Killed a Tesla Driver


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