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After nearly five years of litigation, Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit that alleged the company’s autopilot technology was responsible for a fiery highway crash in Mountain View that killed a driver in 2018.
The settlement was reached on April 3, just days before the case was expected to go to trial. Tesla denied all liability and maintained that the collision was a result of inattentive driving, and not the fault of the vehicle’s Autopilot system, which was activated in the lead up to the crash.
In March 2018, Walter Huang, a 38-year-old Apple employee, was commuting south on Highway 101 in his Tesla Model X when his vehicle swung left at the junction of Highway 85 and crashed into a median barrier at over 70 mph. The collision fully crushed the front of the vehicle, which then careened into two other vehicles before coming to a stop. Huang was transported to a local hospital where he later died.
Following the collision, the National Transportation Safety Board conducted a two-year investigation and concluded that Tesla’s Autopilot system had steered the vehicle into the concrete median and accelerated moments before the crash, the report said. Separate from the NTSB investigation, Huang’s family filed a lawsuit against Tesla over the crash, claiming the vehicle’s Autopilot and emergency braking system were defective.
The NTSB cited driver distraction as a factor in the collision, as well as limitations in Tesla’s Autopilot system and the marketing behind it. Tesla promoted driving features that were not fully tested or adequately explained to drivers, the report said.
The agency also lambasted Caltrans for not implementing basic traffic safety measures. Eleven days before the Tesla drove into the median, another vehicle had rammed into the barrier. The median was designed to minimize the impact of collisions by dissipating energy force. If the median had been repaired, it would have lessened the force of Huang’s collision and he likely would have survived, the agency said.
Since the investigation, there have been more allegations that Tesla’s driver assistance software has not performed as advertised. In 2022, a class-action lawsuit claimed that Tesla was aware of the limitations of its Autopilot system and the dangers it could pose for drivers, who expected the vehicles to be self-driving based on the company’s marketing.
Last year, Tesla engineer Akshay Phatak offered more detail about how the autopilot software worked. “If there are clearly marked lane lines, the system will follow the lane lines,” Phatak said in a legal deposition, according to a Washington Post article on April 7.
The technology relies on cameras to detect obstacles, not sensors like lidar or radar, which are used by fully autonomous driving companies like Waymo or Cruise. As long as the cameras detect painted lane lines, the Autopilot system will work, Phatak said.
But in the case of Huang’s collision, the highway lines were faded. This led the driver assistance software to steer the vehicle off course, according to the crash investigation.
In the settlement, Tesla did not dispute the effectiveness of its technology. “There are many things that can cause Autopilot not to follow a driver’s intended path, and that Autopilot is ‘particularly unlikely to operate as intended’ when lane markings are worn or when lanes branch off,” Tesla said, adding that it was “not a hands-free system.”
Instead, Tesla claimed that the collision was caused by Huang not paying attention to the road because he was playing a game on his cell phone – an allegation that the family has denied. Tesla also claimed that Huang was aware his vehicle was not fully autonomous, as he had noticed that the car had unexpectedly swerved off several times before in the same location. Each time, he had corrected it with a slight steering adjustment, according to Tesla data records.
Tesla said it could prove that it was not liable in a trial, but instead saw the settlement as an opportunity “to put the litigation behind” and ensure that Huang’s wife and children would be taken care of. It also requested that the court keep the settlement amount confidential.
The wrongful death lawsuit against Caltrans, also a defendant in the case, has not reached a settlement, according to legal documents filed with the Santa Clara County Courthouse on April 11.