The $60 Million They Couldn't Refuse

Tesla had a chance to settle. $60 million. End of story. They said no. Naibel Benavides Leon was 22 years old. She wanted to be a nurse. On February 24, 2019, she was standing on the side of Card Sound Road in Key Largo, Florida, with her boyfriend Dillon Angulo. Their car had broken down. They were waiting for help. A Tesla Model S with Autopilot engaged came around the curve. The driver had looked down to find his phone. He didn't look up in time. Naibel was killed instantly. Her body was found 75 feet away. She was 22 years old. After the crash, Tesla said something fascinating. They said they didn't have the data. The collision snapshot — the critical evidence from the car's cameras and sensors in the seconds before impact — was gone. Lost. Unrecoverable. Then a hacker found it. @greentheonly, a researcher who works with Tesla data, looked at the crashed car and within minutes understood what Tesla's engineers somehow couldn't: the data was there. It had always been there. Tesla's own lawyer later called their data handling "clumsy." "Clumsy." A 22-year-old woman is dead, and their data handling was "clumsy."