Court proceedings will begin next week in a trial over a deadly 2018 Tesla crash that occurred in Northern California while Autopilot was engaged.
On the evening of March 23, Apple engineer Walter Huang was traveling on the 101 Freeway through Mountain View in his Tesla Model X when the autopilot software suddenly turned the vehicle directly into a concrete highway median at a high rate of speed.
Huang was critically injured in the collision and died a few hours later at a local hospital.
The 38-year-old had previously complained about the vehicle malfunctioning on that same stretch of freeway telling his wife that Autopilot had veered his SUV toward the same barrier where he later crashed.
The Huang family is alleging that the defective design of the autopilot technology, accompanied by an ineffective automatic emergency braking system, resulted in the deadly crash.
An NTSB investigation that concluded in 2020 determined that the crash was caused, at least in part, by Tesla’s Autopilot system operating improperly.
In addition, the NTSB stated that Tesla’s technology at the time “did not provide an effective means of monitoring the driver’s level of engagement with the driving task.”
The board also found that systems like Autopilot cannot drive themselves, yet drivers use them without paying attention.
Investigators said Huang was likely distracted by playing a game on his smartphone at the time of the crash.
According to the NTSB, Huang likely would have survived the crash if a cushion at the end of the barrier had been repaired by California transportation officials. The cushion had been damaged in a crash 11 days before Huang was killed.
Pre-trial proceedings in the case of Huang v. Tesla Inc. are scheduled to begin on Monday, March 18, in Santa Clara County Superior Court.