Tesla autopilot malfunction caused crash that killed Apple engineer and lawsuits

On the morning of March 23, 2018, Walter Huang, an engineer at Apple, was driving his Tesla Model X on US Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, when the car deviated left into a concrete median, killing Huang in the accident.

A little over a year later, the Huang family sued Tesla, alleging that his autopilot system had malfunctioned, causing the fatal accident.

The family filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court, Santa Clara County, on April 26. As Bloomberg points out, the lawsuit argues that Tesla knew or ought to have known that Tesla's "X-Model" was likely to cause injury to its occupants by leaving the traffic lanes and striking stationary objects when used reasonably foreseeable. The lawsuit says the company should have warned consumers or called back the people.

The complaint also states that the vehicle did not have the appropriate safety features, including automatic emergency brakes. The lawsuit is also known as California DOT, alleging that Huang's press car did not have a working shock attenuator.

Tesla declined to comment on the lawsuit, but a spokesman for Tesla told Gizmodo that all Tesla cars are equipped with automatic emergency braking.

The National Transportation Safety Board's investigation revealed in April 2018 that Huang's car was following a vehicle at about 65 mph, until it turned left, according to the preliminary examination of the data by the NTSB. When the car went to the median, it did not break. Instead, it went from 100 km / h to 70.8 km / h in the three seconds before the collision, the NTSB said.

In an article published on the blog one week after the accident, Tesla said the car had given Huang an audible alert and several visual alerts throughout his ride, and that the car had detected that his hands were not safe. Were not on the steering wheel during the six seconds that preceded. l & # 39; wreck. "The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crash attenuator crushed, but the vehicle logs indicate that no action was taken," says the blog.

"The Tesla autopilot does not prevent all accidents – such a standard would be impossible – but it makes them much less likely to happen," the company's blog continues. "It unequivocally makes the world safer for vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists."

In a statement sent to several media, a lawyer representing Huang's family, B. Mark Fong, said the Huang accident had occurred because "Tesla beta tests its autopilot software on live drivers ".

The lawsuit was filed a week after Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced plans to put one million automated taxis on the roads by 2020.