Tesla settles case over fatal Autopilot crash of Apple engineer

TESLA has settled a lawsuit over a 2018 car crash that killed an Apple engineer after his Model X, operating on Autopilot, swerved off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday (Apr 8).

The settlement was made on the eve of the trial over the high-profile accident involving Tesla’s driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The accident killed 38-year-old Walter Huang. His family had alleged that Autopilot steered his 2017 Model X into a highway barrier. Lawyers for Huang’s family had also raised questions about whether Tesla understood that drivers likely would not or could not use the system as directed, and over what steps the automaker took to protect them.

Tesla had contended that Huang misused the Autopilot system because he was playing a video game just before the accident.

Huang’s lawyer and Tesla were not immediately available for comment.

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If successful, the plaintiffs’ attorneys could have provided a blueprint for others suing over Autopilot. Tesla faces a flurry of lawsuits over crashes related to the alleged use of Autopilot, putting the automaker at risk of large monetary judgments.

“It is striking to me that Tesla decided to go this far publicly and then settle,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina with expertise in autonomous vehicle law. “What this does do, though, is it says to other attorneys, we might settle. We might not always fight it. That is the signal.”

The case follows two previous California trials over Autopilot that Tesla won by arguing the drivers involved had not heeded its instructions to maintain attention while using the system.

Despite marketing features called Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, Tesla has yet to prove it can produce an autonomous car despite years of predictions by co-founder and CEO Elon Musk that one was just around the corner, an expectation that partly underpinned Tesla’s soaring valuation.

The automaker faces lawsuits and investigations into crashes involving its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assistance systems, which are not fully autonomous. Tesla has blamed the accidents on inattentive drivers.

The Autopilot system can steer, accelerate and brake by itself on the open road, but cannot fully replace a human driver, especially in city driving. Tesla materials explaining the system warn that it does not make the car autonomous and requires a “fully attentive driver” who can “take over at any moment”.

Musk said on Friday that Tesla plans to unveil its full-self-driving robotaxis on Aug 8, after Reuters reported that Tesla scrapped an inexpensive car plan in favour of robotaxis. REUTERS