Tesla and the family of an Apple engineer have settled a lawsuit about a crash. The engineer died when his Tesla car crashed while it was on Autopilot mode. The details of the agreement were not shared. The settlement happened right before the trial was supposed to start in a court in California.
Walter Huang, the engineer who died, worked for Apple. His family sued Tesla in 2019. They said the Tesla car he was driving had a problem with its design. They blamed Tesla’s autopilot software for causing the crash on March 23, 2018.
A lawyer representing Huang’s family said that Mrs. Huang lost her husband, and their two children lost their father because Tesla was still testing its Autopilot software with real drivers. The Huang family wanted to make sure that this kind of accident wouldn’t happen again to others driving Tesla cars or any other cars that have autopilot features.
Neither Tesla nor the Huang family gave any comments about the settlement when asked by Business Insider.
There have been other lawsuits against Tesla because of its Autopilot feature, but this is the first time Tesla has settled one, as reported by The Washington Post.
A trial about this could have been bad publicity for Tesla. However, an expert in car technology thought that even if Tesla lost the trial, it wouldn’t hurt them too much. Bryant Walker Smith, who teaches law at the University of South Carolina, said that this was just one case. Tesla could handle whatever costs they had to pay. But he also thought that it might make people in charge of rules about cars like Autopilot look more closely at them.