It looks like Musk and Tesla caved, and settled the Autopilot wrongful death lawsuit.
My guess is that they decided that once their engineer testified under oath that Autopilot was little more than software designed to follow the lines painted on the road, that they had no other option.
Yesterday, trial was due to begin in the case of Huang v. Tesla, a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a man killed in his Tesla Model X in 2018. But the case will now not be heard by a judge—Tesla has settled with the family for an undisclosed sum.
Walter Huang was driving to work in his Model X on March 23, 2018, when his car drove headlong into a concrete divider at an exit on US Highway 101 in California. Tesla's partially automated driving system, Autopilot, was active at the time, and Huang trusted it enough to play video games on his phone despite having noticed that the car got confused at that particular intersection more than once.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated Huang's death and published its findings in 2020. The NTSB found plenty of parties to blame. Tesla's misleading marketing of Autopilot, such as video interviews where the Tesla CEO operated the system without keeping his hands or eyes on the road, and a staged self-driving demonstration contributed to Huang's mistaken trust in Autopilot.
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We are unlikely ever to know the terms of Tesla's settlement with Huang's family. The company asked the court to seal the terms to prevent others from perceiving "the settlement amount as evidence of Tesla’s potential liability for losses, which may have a chilling effect on settlement opportunity in subsequent cases."
They will probably get the record sealed, which is bad, because, given the engineer's admission, Tesla has clearly been been "Toes in Chewing Tobacco," careless.
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