Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over Man’s Death in Crash Involving Its Semi-Autonomous Driving Software

Santa Clara, April 9: Tesla has settled lawsuit brought by the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in a crash while relying on the company's semi-autonomous driving software.

The size of the settlement was not disclosed in court documents filed Monday, just a day before the trial stemming from the 2018 crash on a San Francisco Bay Area highway was scheduled to begin. Tesla EV Infrastructure in India: Elon Musk-Run Company To Search for Sites in Country To Set Up USD 2–3 Billion EV Plant, Says Report.

The family of Walter Huang filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 seeking to hold Tesla — and, by extension, its CEO Elon Musk — liable for repeatedly exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla's self-driving car technology. They claimed the technology, dubbed Autopilot, was promoted in egregious ways that caused vehicle owners to believe they didn't have to remain vigilant while they were behind the wheel.

Evidence indicated that Huang was playing a video game on his iPhone when he crashed into a concrete highway barrier on March 23, 2018. After dropping his son off at preschool, Huang activated the Autopilot feature on his Model X for his commute to his job at Apple.

But less than 20 minutes later, Autopilot veered the vehicle out of its lane and began to accelerate before barreling into a barrier located at a perilous intersection on a busy highway in Mountain View, California. The Model X was still travelling at more than 70 miles per hour (110 kilometers per hour).

Huang, 38, died at the gruesome scene, leaving behind his wife and two children, now 12 and 9 years old.

The case was just one of about a dozen scattered across the US raising questions about whether Musk's boasts about the effectiveness of Tesla's autonomous technology fosters a misguided faith in the company's Autopilot and Full Self Driving, or FSD, mode. The US Justice Department also opened an inquiry last year into how Tesla and Musk promote its autonomous technology, according to regulatory filings that didn't provide many details about the nature of the probe. Tesla Robotaxi Release Date Confirmed: Elon Musk-Run EV Company To Launch New Next-Gen Self-Driving Vehicle on August 8, 2024.

Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, prevailed last year in a Southern California trial focused on whether misperceptions about Tesla's Autopilot feature contributed to a driver in a 2019 crash involving one of the company's cars.