Tesla has settled a dispute with the family of a driver who died in an accident while Autopilot was engaged.

Tesla has reached an out-of-court settlement with the family of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer who crashed a Model X in 2018 while using the active driver assistance system, reports CNBC. The parties reached an agreement immediately before the start of the trial. This allowed the company not only to keep secret the amount of compensation to the family of the deceased, but also to avoid the publication of evidence and testimony in a high-profile case.

In March 2018, 38-year-old Walter Huang was driving his Tesla Model X on Highway 101 in California at a speed of about 110 km/h. The driver assistance system was activated on the car, but for some reason it did not recognize the bump stop on the road, and the car crashed into it at full speed. Mr. Huang died from his injuries in hospital.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted an investigation into the incident in 2020 announcedthat the autopilot system had previously behaved incorrectly on this section of the road, so the driver had to correct the vehicle’s movement. But for some reason he didn’t do it here. The regulator assumed that the driver was distracted by playing a game on his mobile phone.

The company conducted its own investigation and now insists that the driver was distracted from the road: of the 18 minutes that the trip lasted, only 12 minutes did he have his hands on the steering wheel, although he must maintain control over the steering at all times. The car, according to Tesla, gave the driver visual and audio signals, but he never complied with the requirements of the system, which was the cause of the tragedy.

Kirill Sarkhanyants