Tesla’s inner workings are famously secretive — and a newly unsealed court filing reveals the lengths Elon Musk’s electric car company goes to safeguard its prized Autopilot technology.
In a sworn declaration made public this month in a wrongful-death lawsuit involving Autopilot, Tesla engineer Christopher Payne described how closely the company guards the technology behind its driver-assist system — even from many of its own employees.
“Access to certain software, specifically within the Autopilot group, is limited to certain individuals and their access is dependent upon the justification for the need to have access,” Payne wrote.
Payne said that even if someone is a Tesla employee and works on Autopilot-related matters, “that person must justify the need to access software.” That person’s manager, as well as the Autopilot team, “must review and approve (or deny) the request,” wrote Payne.
Only Autopilot engineers, Payne wrote, are permitted in certain areas dedicated to the software’s design and development.
The Autopilot team is one of Tesla’s most secretive, comprising some of the company’s highest-paid staffers who largely operate independently of other engineers, Business Insider has reported. And as Payne said in the declaration, the Autopilot technology is key to the company’s brand.
“The technology that makes up Autopilot is critical to the overall success of Tesla’s business,” wrote Payne. “Not only are Tesla vehicles engineered to be the safest in the world, with the lowest probability of injury, but also much of Tesla’s value and reputation are staked on the Autopilot technology.”
Special ID badges
US District Court for the Southern District of Florida; Handout
Payne’s April 2025 declaration was filed as part of a prior motion by Tesla to maintain the confidentiality of certain information. In the document, Payne wrote that Tesla “takes extensive measures to protect the technology associated with the various features of Autopilot and the research and development behind them.”
Among those measures: access to company computers is password-restricted and multi-factor authentication is required — sometimes multiple times per day — for each software feature accessed, wrote Payne.
Additionally, company-issued laptops have their USB and USB-C ports disabled, Payne, who has worked for Tesla since 2013, wrote.
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Physical access to Tesla’s facilities is also tightly controlled. Special badges are required for entry into each Tesla engineering building, and employees who don’t regularly work in a particular building need to get special clearance to enter that facility, Payne said.
Payne also wrote that every Tesla employee must sign non-disclosure agreements that outline the workers’ obligations to protect the company’s “trade secrets and confidential information.”
Three people with knowledge of the Autopilot team previously told Business Insider that the division’s organizational chart is not available to those outside the team, and even insiders know little about the group’s structure.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
The declaration by Payne, who identified himself in the court papers as a computer vision engineer within the Autopilot team, was filed in a case over a deadly Tesla Model S crash in Florida in 2019 involving Autopilot.
In August, a Florida federal jury found Tesla partly to blame for the Key Largo collision that left a 22-year-old woman dead and her boyfriend seriously injured.
The jury sided with the plaintiffs in the case, awarding the family of Naibel Benavides Leon and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, a combined $329 million in total damages, leaving Tesla on the hook for a $242.5 million payment.
Attorneys for Tesla are challenging the verdict. They’ve argued in court papers that the massive judgment “flies in the face” of the law and should be thrown out.
