SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) 鈥 Tesla has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in a crash while relying on the company鈥檚 semi-autonomous driving software.
The amount Tesla paid to settle the case 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. In a court filing requesting to keep the sum private, Tesla said it agreed to settle the case in order to 鈥渆nd years of litigation.鈥
Shares of Tesla Inc., down 30% this year, slipped 1% before the market opened Tuesday.
The family of Walter Huang filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 seeking to hold Tesla 鈥 and, by extension, its CEO Elon Musk 鈥 liable for repeatedly exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla鈥檚 self-driving car technology. They claimed the technology, , was promoted in egregious ways that caused vehicle owners to believe they didn鈥檛 have to remain vigilant while they were behind the wheel.
Evidence indicated that Huang 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 traveling 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 U.S. raising questions about whether Musk鈥檚 boasts about the effectiveness of Tesla鈥檚 autonomous technology fosters a misguided faith the technology, The company also has an optional feature it calls Full Self Driving. The U.S. Justice Department last year into how Tesla and Musk promote its autonomous technology, according to regulatory filings that didn鈥檛 provide many details about the nature of the probe.
Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, prevailed last year in a Southern California trial focused on whether misperceptions about Tesla鈥檚 Autopilot feature contributed to a driver in a 2019 crash involving one of the company鈥檚 cars.
