Tesla resolves lawsuit over man's death in semi-autonomous crash

Tesla and the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who was using the company's semi-autonomous driving software when he died in an accident have reached a settlement resolution.

The family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in an accident while using Tesla's semi-autonomous driving software has resolved a lawsuit against the corporation. Court filings filed on Monday, the day before the trial related to the 2018 collision on a San Francisco Bay Area highway was slated to start, did not reveal the sum that Tesla paid to settle the lawsuit.

In a court statement, Tesla said that it agreed to the settlement to "end years of litigation" and requested that the sum remain privately disclosed. Tesla's stock fell 1% before Tuesday's market opening, down 30% this year, due to a negligence and wrongful death case filed by Walter Huang's family in 2019 against Elon Musk for exaggerating Tesla's self-driving car technology capabilities.

They said that the technology, known as Autopilot, was pushed in such a way that car owners were led to believe that they didn't need to be alert when operating a vehicle. On March 23, 2018, Huang was playing a video game on his iPhone when he collided with a concrete highway barrier. He set his Model X on Autopilot for work at Apple, but less than twenty minutes later, the car accelerated, colliding with the barrier at a dangerous intersection in Mountain View, California, at over  70 miles per hour.