Santa Clara, California – The family of a Silicon Valley engineer killed in a collision while using Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving software filed a lawsuit, which the company has now resolved.
The amount Tesla paid to settle the case should have been disclosed in court documents filed on Monday, just one day before the trial for the 2018 incident on a San Francisco Bay Area highway was slated to begin. In a court petition demanding that the value be hidden, Tesla settled the matter to “end years of litigation.”
Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over Man’s Death In A Crash Involving Its Semi-Autonomous Driving Software
Tesla Inc. shares, down 30% this year, fell 1% before the market began on Tuesday.
In 2019, Walter Huang’s family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit against Tesla and, by extension, its CEO Elon Musk, alleging that Tesla frequently exaggerated the capabilities of its self-driving car technology. They argued that the system, known as Autopilot, was advertised in inappropriate ways, leading vehicle owners to assume they did not need to be cautious when driving.
According to the evidence, Huang was playing a video game on his iPhone when he slammed into a concrete highway barrier on March 23, 2018.
After leaving his son off at preschool, Huang used his Model X’s Autopilot feature to drive to his job at Apple. But less than 20 minutes later, Autopilot swerved the vehicle out of its lane and proceeded to accelerate, crashing into a barrier at a dangerous intersection on a busy highway in Mountain View, California. The Model X was still moving at almost 70 mph (110 km/h).
Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over Man’s Death In A Crash Involving Its Semi-Autonomous Driving Software
Huang, 38, died at the terrible scene, leaving behind his wife and two children, ages 12 and 9.
The example was one of roughly a dozen throughout the United States that raised concerns about whether Musk’s boasts about the performance of the autonomous technology inspire a mistaken faith in the technology. The firm also offers an extra capability called Full Self Driving. According to regulatory filings, the US Justice Department investigated how Tesla and Musk promoted their autonomous technology last year.
Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over Man’s Death In A Crash Involving Its Semi-Autonomous Driving Software
Located in Austin, Texas, won a Southern California trial last year that investigated whether a driver’s misperceptions about the Company’s Autopilot system contributed to a 2019 crash involving one of its vehicles.
source – ap
