Tesla settles lawsuit over fatal crash involving self-driving software

The victim's family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit to hold Tesla liable for exaggerating the capabilities of the self-driving tech.

Tesla has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in a crash while relying on the company's semi-autonomous driving software.

The size of the settlement 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.

The family of Walter Huang filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 seeking to hold Tesla — and, by extension, its CEO Elon Musk — liable for repeatedly exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla's self-driving car technology. They claimed the technology, dubbed Autopilot, was promoted in egregious ways that caused vehicle owners to believe they didn't have to remain vigilant while they were behind the wheel.

Evidence indicated that Huang was playing a video game 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).