Electric carmaker Tesla has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of an Apple engineer who was killed when his Model X swerved off a California highway while on autopilot. Tesla settled with the family of Wei Lun Huang in the wrongful death suit they filed over the crash in Mountain View, California in 2018, court filings showed on Monday. The settlement means that Tesla will avoid a jury trial that would have focused scrutiny on its self-driving technology months ahead of the scheduled launch of its self-driving Robotaxi in August. The amount Tesla paid to settle the case was not disclosed in court documents after the company asked that it remain under seal. Huang's family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 accusing Tesla of liability due to exaggerated claims about the firm's self-driving technology.

The sun had yet to rise in Delray Beach, Fla., when Jeremy Banner flicked on Autopilot. His red Tesla Model 3 sped down the highway at nearly 70 mph, his hands no longer detected on the wheel. Seconds later, the Tesla plowed into a semi-truck, shearing off its roof as it slid under the truck's trailer. Banner was killed on impact. Banner's family sued after the gruesome 2019 collision, one of at least 10 active lawsuits involving Tesla's Autopilot, several of which are expected to go to court over the next year. Together, the cases could determine whether the driver is solely responsible when things go wrong in a vehicle guided by Autopilot -- or whether the software should also bear some of the blame.

The government will soon release data on collisions involving vehicles with autonomous or partially automated driving systems that will likely single out Tesla for a disproportionately high number of such crashes. In coming days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to issue figures it has been gathering for nearly a year. The agency said in a separate report last week that it had documented more than 200 crashes involving Teslas that were using Autopilot, "Full Self-Driving," Traffic-Aware Cruise Control or some other of the company's partially automated systems. Tesla's figure and its crash rate per 1,000 vehicles was substantially higher than the corresponding numbers for other automakers that provided such data to The Associated Press ahead of NHTSA's release. The number of Tesla collisions was revealed as part of a NHTSA investigation of Teslas on Autopilot that had crashed into emergency and other vehicles stopped along roadways.

A first-of-it's kind case in Los Angeles County is going to play a big role in determining culpability whenever self-driving cars get into accidents. Prosecutors have charged a driver with felony manslaughter after his Tesla crashed into a car in 2019, killing two people. The accused was in the driver's seat, but prosecutors say his Tesla … was on autopilot. A Tesla on autopilot killed two people in Gardena. Is the driver guilty of manslaughter?

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019. All Tesla models, including the Model S, now come standard with Autopilot. The defendant appears to be the first person to be charged with a felony in the United States for a fatal crash involving a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system.

Tesla claims the Model S Plaid is the world's quickest car and that the $129,990 sedan can accelerate to 60 mph in less than two seconds. A Tesla using its partially automated driving system slammed into a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser Saturday on an interstate near downtown Orlando and narrowly missed its driver, who had pulled over to assist a disabled vehicle. Earlier this month, the U.S. government opened a formal investigation into Tesla's Autopilot driving system after a series of similar collisions with parked emergency vehicles. The trooper whose cruiser was hit shortly before 5 a.m. Saturday had activated his emergency lights and was on the way to the disabled vehicle when the Tesla hit the cruiser's left side and then collided with the other vehicle, highway patrol spokeswoman Lt. Kim Montes told The Orlando Sentinel.

US government regulators are opening an investigation into Tesla's Autopilot system after cars using the feature crashed into stopped emergency vehicles. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced the investigation on Monday, and it encompasses 765,000 Teslas sold in the US, a significant fraction of all of the company's sales in the country. The agency says the probe will cover 11 crashes since 2018; the crashes caused 17 injuries and one death.

When Mangesh Gururaj's wife left home to pick up their child from math lessons one Sunday earlier this month, she turned on her Tesla Model S and hit "Summon," a self-parking feature that the electric automaker has promoted as a central step toward driverless cars. But as the family's $65,000 sedan reversed itself out of the garage, Gururaj said, the car abruptly struck the garage's side wall, ripping its front end off with a loud crack. The maimed Tesla looked as if it would have kept driving, Gururaj said, if his wife hadn't hit the brakes. No one was hurt, but Gururaj was rattled: The car had failed disastrously, during the simplest of maneuvers, using one of the most basic features from the self-driving technology he and his family had trusted many times at higher speeds. "This is just a crash in the garage. But what if we were summoning and there was a child it didn't see?" said Gururaj, an IT consultant in North Carolina, who bought the car last year.

A Tesla car was driving in "autopilot" mode when it crashed into a stopped firetruck in Utah, the company said in a report to police that repeatedly cast blame on the driver, not its semi-autonomous driving system. The confirmation that the vehicle's technology failed to prevent it from colliding with a stopped object in its path came the same day that the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it was sending a team to investigate the 11 May crash in Utah. Tesla officials told police on Wednesday that the driver, who suffered a broken ankle when her Tesla Model S crashed, had turned on the "autosteer" and "cruise control" features about 80 seconds prior to the crash and taken her hands off the wheel, Tesla officials told police on Wednesday. In recent weeks, Elon Musk's electric car company has faced fresh scrutiny over the safety of its autopilot feature, which is supposed to assist drivers in navigating the road but cannot drive the cars on its own. In response to numerous high-profile autopilot crashes, including a fatal collision in California, the CEO has insisted that his technology is safer than traditional cars.

Journalists who write about Tesla's Autopilot system kill people. That, at any rate, seemed to be the contention of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an extraordinary corporate earnings call on Wednesday. The quarterly conference call with investors--a routine affair for most public companies--took a left turn when Musk cut short the Q&A, deeming their questions about Tesla's finances "boring" and "bonehead" and taking questions instead from a 25-year-old YouTuber who had tweeted at him on Monday. As Tesla's stock plunged in after-hours trading, Musk detoured into a Trumpian rant--yes, another one--against the dishonest media. The visionary entrepreneur–turned–press critic blasted journalists for publishing stories about accidents involving Tesla's autonomous driving software, calling such coverage "outrageous" and "fundamentally misleading."