Tesla has settled a lawsuit over a 2018 crash that killed an Apple engineer after his Model X, which was operating in autopilot mode, veered off a highway near San Francisco, court documents filed on Monday show.
The settlement agreement came on the eve of a trial over a high-profile accident involving Tesla’s driver-assistance technology. Tesla has faced a number of lawsuits over crashes involving the alleged use of Autopilot, putting the automaker at risk of large cash payouts and reputational damage.
The settlement, the terms of which were not disclosed, comes at a time when CEO Elon Musk is making major moves to promote autonomous driving technology, which he calls key to the financial future of the world’s most expensive automaker.
The 2018 crash killed 38-year-old Walter Huang. His family claimed Autopilot sent his 2017 Model X into a barrier on the motorway. Plaintiffs’ lawyers asked a Tesla witness whether the company knew drivers were not keeping their eyes on the road when using its driver-assistance system, Reuters reported last month, citing a transcript of the testimony.
Tesla claimed Huang was misusing the autopilot system because he was playing a video game shortly before the crash.
The crash that killed Huang is among hundreds of US crashes in which the Autopilot system has been a suspected factor in reports to auto safety regulators.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has studied at least 956 crashes in which Autopilot was initially reported to have been used. Separately, the agency has launched more than 40 investigations into crashes involving Tesla’s automated driving systems that resulted in 23 deaths. Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina with expertise in autonomous vehicle law, said:
It is striking to me that Tesla decided to go this far publicly and then settle. 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 lawsuits in California over the Autopilot system, which Tesla won, claiming that drivers failed to heed its instructions on how to maintain attention when using the system.
Tesla has yet to prove that it can produce autonomous cars, despite years of predictions by co-founder and CEO Musk that they are just around the corner, which is partly what underpinned Tesla’s meteoric rise in value.
