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Tesla<\/a> has settled lawsuit brought by the family of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in a crash while relying on the company\u2019s semi-autonomous driving software.<\/p>\n The size of the settlement was not disclosed in court documents filed Monday, just a day before the trial stemming from the 2018 crash on a San Francisco Bay Area highway was scheduled to begin.<\/p>\n The family Walter Huang filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 seeking to hold Tesla \u2014 and, by extension, its CEO Elon Musk \u2014 liable for repeatedly exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla\u2019s self-driving car technology. They claimed the technology,\u00a0dubbed Autopilot<\/a>, was promoted in egregious ways that caused vehicle owners to believe they didn\u2019t have to remain vigilant while they were behind the wheel.<\/p>\n Evidence indicated that Huang\u00a0was playing a video game<\/a>\u00a0on his iPhone when he crashed into a concrete highway barrier on March 23, 2018.<\/p>\n After dropping his son off at preschool, Huang activated the Autopilot feature on his Model X<\/a> for his commute to his job at Apple<\/a>. But less than 20 minutes later, Autopilot veered the vehicle out of its lane and began to accelerate before barreling into a barrier located at a perilous intersection on a busy highway in Mountain View, California. The Model X was still traveling at more than 70 miles per hour (110 kilometers per hour).<\/p>\n Huang, 38, died at the gruesome scene, leaving behind his wife and two children, now 12 and 9 years old.<\/p>\n The case was just one of about a dozen scattered across the U.S. raising questions about whether Musk\u2019s boasts about the effectiveness of Tesla\u2019s autonomous technology fosters a misguided faith in the company\u2019s Autopilot and Full Self Driving, or FSD, mode. The U.S. Justice Department\u00a0also opened an inquiry<\/a>\u00a0last year into how Tesla and Musk promote its autonomous technology, according to regulatory filings that didn\u2019t provide many details about the nature of the probe.<\/p>\n Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, prevailed last year in a Southern California trial focused on whether misperceptions about Tesla\u2019s Autopilot feature contributed to a driver in a 2019 crash involving one of the company\u2019s cars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nSubscribe to the Eye on AI newsletter to stay abreast of how AI is shaping the future of business. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n