Elon Musk is planning to launch Cybercabs, fully autonomous vehicles without the means for a human to control them, any day now. But a lawsuit that closed this year indicates the electric car company may not be ready for the launch.
In March 2024, Neima Benavides and Dillon Angulo filed a lawsuit against Tesla after a self-driving Tesla ran into Angulo and Naibel Benavides Leon’s parked car, killing Benavides Leon and seriously injuring Angulo. By August 2025, a jury had decided Tesla was partially at fault, and, in February 2026, a judge denied Tesla’s appeal of the case. Tesla was required to pay $243 million in damages.
Tesla also changed the name of its Autopilot and Full-Self Driving features to make it clear that humans shouldn’t actually let their cars drive without supervision. But the car company might have avoided a guilty ruling entirely if not for one key piece of evidence.
As part of the lawsuit, the jury was asked to figure out what percent of the fatal crash was Tesla’s fault. Tesla said it did not have the crash video. That’s where a hacker, known by his X handle as @greentheonly, comes into play. The hacker had been working for Tesla through its Bug Bounty program, reporting software vulnerabilities to the company for a $15,000 reward. He was able to recover the crash data and prove that Tesla did actually have access to it, which he alleges Tesla knew, the Washington Post reported.
“For any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there,” Green told the Washington Post. He also said Tesla has beefed up vehicle crash data security in the time since. “If an accident happened today like this, I won’t be able to extract the data,” he said.
Self-driving Teslas are still getting into crashes. Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that Teslas with active driver-assist systems got into 207 wrecks in May — the highest number on record. Just this month, San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan was injured in a Tesla that he said was in autopilot mode. His car swerved into oncoming traffic at low speed when he turned around to retrieve his phone from the backseat. “Who knows what happened when I turned around,” said Shanahan in a press conference. “Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off. That’s something that I don’t know yet.”
In March, the NHTSA elevated an ongoing investigation into the car company around crashes potentially caused by self-driving software failures. Those concerns are also echoed by early Tesla backer Ross Gerber, co-founder of investment firm Gerber Kawasaki. “Considering the fact that my car still can’t drive itself, and he’s been saying it’s going to drive itself for 10 years, and I’ve been testing full self-driving for over five years, personally, I’m so frustrated with it,” he told Benzinga. He also said, “We’re supposed to have cabs in all major cities right now. We don’t have one cab that works.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to Moneywise’s request for comment.
