Tesla has reached a settlement with the family of a driver who died in a 2018 crash involving the use of Tesla’s driver assistance program just days before a trial in California state court was set to kick into gear.
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The driver, 38-year-old Apple engineer Walter Huang, was behind the wheel of his Tesla Model X SUV in March 2018 when it crashed into a barrier on a California highway. Tesla’s driver assistance technology, Autopilot, was engaged at the time. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed and Tesla has filed a motion to seal the amount of the settlement.
The lawsuit was filed by Huang’s family in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. The plaintiffs questioned whether Tesla had failed to properly introduce safeguards to prevent consumers from misusing Autopilot. They also questioned whether Tesla exaggerated the technology’s capabilities and alleged that Autopilot steered the Model X off into the barrier.
In 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board criticized Tesla for ignoring safety recommendations that had been communicated to it and five other companies in 2017. But the federal agency also determined that Huang was likely distracted and had been playing a game on his phone at the time of the crash.
“The sole cause of this crash was his highly extraordinary misuse of his vehicle and its Autopilot features so that he could play a videogame,” Tesla said in a court brief.
The settlement was instantly celebrated by critics of Tesla and its driver assistance technology, including Green Hills Software CEO Dan O’Dowd. He’s been waging a multimillion-dollar campaign to keep Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software off the road.
“Huang’s family claimed Autopilot and driver monitoring system were defective and Tesla’s false marketing of Autopilot resulted in Huang’s death,” O’Dowd wrote Monday on X. “$TSLA’s settlement means the family was right.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has frequently touted his company’s technology and promised last week to unveil a self-driving electric vehicle in August, has been no stranger to lawsuits. In the past, he has said that Tesla will “never seek victory in a just case against us” and will “never surrender/settle an unjust case against us.” Tesla employed what Musk has called a “hardcore” legal team that reports directly to him.
“Tesla policy is never to give in to false claims, even if we would lose, and never to fight true claims, even if we would win,” Musk said in 2021, referring to Tesla’s $1.5 million settlement over a ill-regarded software update to Tesla Model S sedans.
In addition to the Huang case, Tesla is facing several lawsuits in federal and state court over its driver assistance technology. The company has also been accused of false advertising by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles and investigated by the state attorney general’s office over its marketing practices related to Autopilot and FSD. The Department of Justice has also asked Tesla for documents related to the technologies.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has reviewed 956 crashes where Autopilot was initially reported to be in use. The agency has launched more than three dozen investigations into accidents involving Tesla’s software.
Tesla won two previous California trials over Autopilot largely by blaming human errors for the accidents — and one fatality — that occurred.
