Tesla has settled the lawsuit brought by the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in an accident while counting on the corporate’s semi-autonomous driving software.
The amount of the settlement was not disclosed in court documents filed Monday, only a day before the trial over the 2018 San Francisco Bay Area highway crash was set to start.
The Walter Huang family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 searching for to carry Tesla — and by extension its CEO Elon Musk — responsible for repeatedly exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving automotive technology. They claimed the technology called autopilotwas advertised in an egregious manner that led vehicle owners to consider they didn’t have to remain vigilant while behind the wheel.
There is evidence that Huang played a video game on his iPhone when he crashed right into a concrete guardrail on the highway on March 23, 2018.
After dropping his son off at daycare, Huang activated the Autopilot feature on his Model X to drive to his job at Apple. But lower than 20 minutes later, Autopilot sent the vehicle off the lane and started accelerating before it crashed right into a barrier at a dangerous intersection on a busy highway in Mountain View, California. The Model X was still traveling at greater than 70 miles per hour (110 kilometers per hour).
Huang, 38, died on the gruesome crime scene, forsaking his wife and two children, now aged 12 and 9.
The case was just one in all a couple of dozen within the U.S. that raise questions on whether Musk’s boasts in regards to the effectiveness of Tesla’s autonomous technology are fostering false confidence in the corporate’s Autopilot and Full Self Driving (FSD) modes. The US Department of Justice have also opened an investigation last 12 months about how Tesla and Musk are promoting their autonomous technology, in response to regulatory filings that did not provide many details in regards to the nature of the probe.
Austin, Texas-based Tesla prevailed last 12 months in a Southern California lawsuit over whether misconceptions about Tesla’s Autopilot feature contributed to a driver crashing one in all the corporate’s cars in 2019 company committed.
