The family of the late model X owner continues his 2018 accident

The family of the late Model X client, Walter Huang, sued Tesla and the state of California in a state court, family lawyers said Wednesday.

"Ms. Huang lost her husband and two children, because Tesla is currently testing her autopilot software on live drivers," said family lawyer Mark Fong. He says the family wants to make sure other drivers do not suffer from Huang's fate.

Huang died in March 2018 while traveling on a highway in Mountain View, California. His autopilot was activated while his X model was approaching a point where an exit lane diverged on the left side of the road. His Tesla struck a concrete barrier separating the two lanes and died as a result of his injuries.

A June report from the National Transportation Safety Board reconstructed the final seconds of the trip. The agency found that, seven seconds before the deadly collapse, "the Tesla had begun a left-leaning move" that dragged it into the gap between the divergent paths, which it apparently considered a traffic way.

According to the NTSB, the car then detected that there was no more vehicle in front of her. Then he started speeding up and crashed into the lane divider at 70 miles to the hour. The NTSB stated that there was "no stop before stop or evasive direction detected".

According to his family, the autopilot is "excessively dangerous"

Tesla declined to comment on this story, but in the past, the company publicly accused Huang of his own death. "The only way for this accident to happen is that Mr. Huang does not pay attention to the road, despite the multiple warnings of the car," the company said last year.

According to the NTSB, Huang's hands were detected for 34 seconds at the last minute of the trip, but not during the last six seconds.

Huang's lawyers say Tesla is still responsible for making a product that would have entered the lane divider directly. The prosecution contends that Model X "was in a defective state" and "was excessively dangerous". The complaint alleges that Tesla was aware of the defects of the autopilot but did not adequately warn customers.

The trial compares the Tesla autopilot to emergency brake products manufactured by other automakers – Subaru, Mazda, Chrysler, Mitsubishi and Honda – who sold cars equipped with brake systems. automatic emergency when Huang bought his model X at Tesla. (All recent Tesla vehicles, including those from Huang, are equipped with automatic emergency braking.)

The lawsuit appears to imply that these other systems would prevent a car moving towards a concrete lane separator, but the prosecution in fact provides no evidence in this regard. And there are reasons to doubt it.

As we explained in detail last year, most of the driver assistance systems currently on the market are explicitly proposed. do not designed to avoid high-speed collisions with fixed objects. At highway speeds, these systems generally ignore stationary objects and focus on maintaining a safe distance from other moving vehicles.

Many emergency braking systems currently on the market are simply not sophisticated enough to distinguish an object. in the road of an object near the road. If they were trying to stop for every object that seemed to be on the road, they would have a lot of false positives. And at speed on the highway, snapping unnecessarily on the brakes can also be a cause of accident.

Nevertheless, the prosecution alleges that Walter Huang's X model not only prevented an accident with the lane divider, he actively steered the vehicle towards the barrier. This could place this collision in a different category of situations in which an emergency braking system simply can not prevent an imminent collision.

Tesla argued that using the autopilot makes Tesla's cars safer, but it's hard to find clear evidence about it. Tesla has published statistics showing that its cars crash less often when the autopilot is activated, but this may simply reflect the fact that the autopilot is mainly used on divided motorways, which tend to have a higher overall collision rate. low.

The Huang also sued the state of California

Track dividers are often delivered with a collision attenuator, an accordion-like device that helps absorb the shocks of a car. Unfortunately, the collision attenuator for this particular lane divider was damaged during another accident at the same place the previous week. California's transportation department had not been replaced at the time of the Huang crash.

The Huang family has also named the state of California as a defendant in its lawsuit. The family argues that the roads department had more time than needed to repair the attenuator and that its inability to do so created a dangerous situation on the roadway, making the Golden State partially responsible for Huang's death.