Wrongful death trial for Apple engineer killed in Tesla gets underway

Enlarge / Walter Huang's Model X in a tow yard days after his fatal crash. (credit: NTSB)

Tesla and its controversial Autopilot driver assistance system goes on trial again today in California. It's fighting a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Walter Huang, an Apple engineer who was killed in 2018 when his Tesla Model X drove head-first into a highway gore. But despite the findings of a highly critical National Transportation Safety Board investigation, Tesla may well win in court—California juries let the automaker off the hook in two separate trials last year.

Regular complaints

Huang died on March 23, 2018, when his Model X crashed at 70 mph into a concrete divider on US Highway 101, apparently confused by an interchange with State Highway 85 to its left.

Huang trusted Tesla Autopilot, the carmaker's partially automated driving system that, at the time, combined forward-looking radar and optical sensors to control the car's speed on the road relative to other vehicles and keep it centered within the lane. (In the years since, Tesla has abandoned the use of forward-looking radar, relying on just optical cameras instead.)